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In the preceding issue of this journal, a generalized version of the Brass growth balance method was proposed that made it applicable to populations that are not stable and are open to migration. In this companion paper, the results of applying this new procedure to data from India's Sample Registration System for the decades 1971-80 and 1981-90 are discussed. The results at the national level show that, during the decade 1981-90, 5 per cent of the deaths among men, 12 per cent of the deaths among women, and about 7 per cent of births were being missed by the system. Further, it is estimated that the level of under-enumeration in the 1991 Census was more than that of the 1981 Census by 0.7 per cent for males and 1.4 per cent for females. The paper also presents results for major Indian states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mortality decline has historically been largely a result of reductions in the level of mortality at all ages. A number of leading researchers on ageing, however, suggest that the next revolution of longevity increase will be the result of slowing down the rate of ageing. In this paper, we show mathematically how varying the pace of senescence influences life expectancy. We provide a formula that holds for any baseline hazard function. Our result is analogous to Keyfitz's ‘entropy’ relationship for changing the level of mortality. Interestingly, the influence of the shape of the baseline schedule on the effect of senescence changes is the complement of that found for level changes. We also provide a generalized formulation that mixes level and slope effects. We illustrate the applicability of these models using recent mortality decline in Japan and the problem of period to cohort translation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reconstructs the trend in the population sex ratio in India between 1971 and 1996 from available information on changes in sex differentials in mortality in the country since the beginning of the century. It is estimated that, although the mortality of females relative to that of males in India has improved since 1968, the population sex ratio increased between 1971 and 1981, stayed constant between 1981 and 1991, and started to decrease only after 1991. This implies that the recorded decrease and increase in the periods 1971-81 and 1981-91 respectively were both spurious and were the results of undercounts of females in 1971 and 1991. Another implication of this finding is that, owing to the lagged effect of past mortality on current trends in the population sex ratio, this ratio is a bad proxy for use in the study of changes in differential mortality by sex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estimates of mortality in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-79) range from 20,000 deaths according to former Khmer Rouge sources, to over three million victims according to Vietnamese government sources. This paper uses an unusual data source -- the 1992 electorate lists registered by the United Nations -- to estimate the population size after the Khmer Rouge regime and the extent of "excess" mortality in the 1970s. These data also provide the first breakdown of population by single year of age, which allows analysis of the age structure of "excess" mortality and inference of the relative importance of violence as a cause of death in that period. The estimates derived here are more comparable with the higher estimates made in the past. In addition, the analysis of likely causes of death that could have generated the age pattern of "excess" mortality clearly shows a larger contribution of direct or violent mortality than has been previously recognized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human populations have lived on the earth for millions of years, yet the study of population history only began to be established in the mid-twentieth century. In spite of the considerable progress in the study of historical demography which has since been made, there have been hardly any detailed studies of fertility and mortality before the sixteenth century. This study, by analysing a set of Chinese genealogies, examines long-term mortality patterns in a selected clan population over a period of more than 1000 years. The result shows that, in this selected population, mortality fluctuated around a relatively high level and showed no secular change over the very long period studied. The study also provides a comparison between the mortality patterns found in the selected population and those observed in a much larger Chinese lineage population, as well as those recorded among the British elites born between the sixteenth and the early nineteenth century. Based on the findings of this research, the paper presents some tentative suggestions about long-term mortality changes in Chinese history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]