Mortality differentials in France during the late 18th and early 19th centuries

"The very high quality of a set of marriage records for Paris during the 1860s made it possible to apply indirect methods to estimate adult mortality differentials by certain geographical and social criteria of the 19th century. The largest differences between groups were observed to be social, geographical origin apparently having little impact.... It is interesting that social differences in adult mortality are similar in magnitude to those observed today. Perhaps the principal factor of differentiation is then the level of child mortality.... It is by no means necessary to have a set of data as complete as ours. The indirect methods we have used proved largely adequate for estimating mortality differentials."

The contribution of existing sources to the dating of events: a survey in Mali's Bwa country

"We exploited the sources of information already existing in Mali's Bwa country in order to facilitate the dating of biographical events. Their contribution was multiple: they gave an exact date for a substantial number of births (25%), they provided dating landmarks within the biographies (in two thirds of birth histories, at least one birth could thus be pinpointed), and they made it possible to construct sets of dating references at the family level (lineage calendars). Based on the same principle of chronological classification as the historical calendar, the lineage calendar improves the method by replacing public events by family events with which the respondents are more familiar (births and deaths of kin)."

The aging of the population and the financing of local governments

"This paper explores the residential property tax burdens faced by elderly homeowners in the United States. The results demonstrate that the use of annual data in income and property tax liabilities to calculate tax burdens overstates the regressivity of the property tax. The magnitude of the bias created by using annual income is determined by comparing tax burdens calculated from annual data with burdens calculated from tax liabilities and income data covering a 12-year period. The results indicate that while the residential property tax on the non-elderly is approximately proportional, the pattern of burdens on the elderly remains regressive."

A decade of change in contraceptive behaviour in Latin America: a multivariate decomposition analysis

This study relies heavily on World Fertility Survey and Demographic and Health Surveys data to examine recent trends and determinants of contraceptive use in five Latin American countries: Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru. These countries experienced a substantial increase in contraceptive prevalence in the inter-survey period. Within countries, however, the increase was not equally shared by all social and demographic groups. The study found that relatively disadvantaged groups experienced greater gains in contraceptive use. Despite the prevailing tendency towards convergence, wide differentials in contraceptive behavior among social sectors still persist. A decomposition analysis based on logistic regression revealed that certain shifts in the population composition--i.e., increased proportion of urban and better educated women and a growing proportion of mothers who want to discontinue child-bearing--contributed substantially to the aggregate increase in contraceptive prevalence in most countries. Structural changes, understood as changes in the relations between the explanatory variables and the likelihood of using contraception, were also found to play a significant role in contraceptive use trends, particularly in Colombia.

The relationship between sex roles, fertility, and family size preferences

Interviews regarding sex-role attitudes, sex-role behaviors, fertility, and fertility preferences were conducted with 583 currently married women aged 18 through 49. Separate correlational analyses for blacks, Anglos, and Hispanic women revealed that for Anglos and blacks sex-role attitudes appeared to be more highly associated with children raised and desired fertility than did division of household tasks and decisions. Past and present role behavior outside of the family (i.e., employment experience) were related to fertility and fertility preferences for all three groups. A path analysis, applied for Anglos only, indicated that number of children raised may influence sex-role behavior and attitudes which, in turn, may influence current fertility desires. However, the variable with the largest direct effect on total children desired was the number of children one already has. Various dimensions of sex roles influenced fertility desires in different ways. Traditionalism of attitudes had a positive effect while relative performance of feminine tasks had a negative effect on total number of children wanted.

Mortality

The author surveys the contributions of the U.N. Population Division to the study of mortality and elaborates the three that he considers to be the most significant. "They are synthesizing the findings of national and regional research on mortality issues; developing and disseminating methods for improving estimates of levels and trends in mortality and standards of analysis; and bringing together researchers working from different perspectives to discuss mortality issues of global importance and disseminating the results of those meetings to potential users." Publications, reports, model life tables, and other tools created by the Population Division are identified.

The big, bad city: mega-city myth?

This paper raises the question of whether or not the virtues of big city size were exaggerated in the literature which appeared in the 1970s with respect to developing country megacities. It examines negative externalities (especially pollution), the capital costs associated with megacity growth, the productivity advantages of large cities, the role of spatial restructuring towards a policentric pattern as a relief to core city congestion, and the problems of metropolitan management (including the appropriate institutional framework). The adoption of constructive policy actions could handle the following problems: that the declining rates of megacity growth may reflect declining productivity advantages; that capital costs of urbanization increase strongly with city size; that there are diseconomies of scale in urban management; that negative externalities may be more severe in developing country megacities in physical but not in imputed monetary damage terms; and that policentric evolution may be hampered by the wrong type of government intervention.