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According to the author, in a paper published in a previous issue of the journal Population Studies, he questioned the validity of the so-called Far Eastern pattern of mortality as a unique regional mortality model. In her response researcher Noreen Goldman makes three major points. First, the Far Eastern mortality pattern as originally formulated by her differs from that defined by the United Nations Population Division. Second, the method used in author's analysis is different from that of her and not effective in discerning mortality patterns. Third, the Far Eastern mortality pattern as defined by her is indeed a unique mortality model. In this article the author comments on these assertions and further demonstrates that the Far Eastern mortality pattern is not unique regional model. Goldman provides some useful information in her rejoinder, but her major conclusions are unconvincing. While her early investigation into mortality changes in East Asia played a notable role in alerting demographers to the deficiencies of life tables for describing mortality experiences outside of the industrialized world, the claim that the Far Eastern mortality pattern is a distinctive regional mortality model is not well founded.

This paper examines the magnitude of urban-rural differentials in infant mortality in England during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and also compares the timing of decline for a selection of towns of varying size, and their immediate rural hinterlands. Most towns continued to experience short-term fluctuations in infant mortality until the very end of the nineteenth century; however, in some of the adjacent rural communities - where levels of infant mortality were much lower - conditions were sufficiently favourable to allow a continuous decline in infant mortality from at least the 1860s, if not before. The final part of the paper considers the causes of these patterns and their implications for explanations of infant mortality decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses translation formulae for time-dependent cohort and period quantum for non-repeatable events. Cohort quantum expressions are investigated for two cases: one in which period quantum, and another in which the sum of the period rates decreases linearly with time. En both cases the assumption is that period tempo does not change. Sufficient conditions are given for the situation in which the cohort quantum simply equals the period quantum measured at the time when the cohort reaches the mean age of the period schedule of age-specific rates, given that the period rate sum is a polynomial function of time. The paper takes up an issue which was unresolved in the article `Translation formulae for none repeatable events" which appeared in the July 1994 issue of Population Studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United Kingdom s Old Age Pensions Act of 1908 instituted means-tested, non- contributory pensions for men and women aged 70 or over. The pension and the lack of civil registration of births before 1864 caused many Irish to exaggerate their ages in the Census of 1911. In this paper a linked sample from the manuscript censuses of 1901 and 1911 is used to estimate the magnitude and determinants of this age mis- representation. Our results show three types of age discrepancies: those associated with a significant reduction in age-heaping; those associated with efforts to obtain a pension before age 70; and some apparent age-exaggeration unconnected with the Old Age Pension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, which is published in two parts, is focused on demographic responses to famine in South Asia. In Part I the famines of 1876-78, 1896-97 and 1899-4900 are examined. The data that relate to disasters evince clear regularities. In each of these famines the timing of food-price rises and reductions in conceptions was similar. During the initial stages of famine the death rate was not particularly high. The main period of mortality occurred one full year after the price and conception movements. It coincided with the resumption of the monsoon, and malaria probably played a major role. There was a clear pattern to proportional increases in mortality by age - in these terms older children and adults were hardest hit. In each famine, deaths of males increased most - perhaps partly reflecting the fact that by the time of the main peak in deaths a smaller- than-usual fraction of the female population were either pregnant or lactating. Explanations for some of these regularities are considered. In Part II of the paper (to be published in the next issue) the same basic concerns a propos the Bengal famine of 1943 -44 and the Bangladesh famine of 1974-75 will be examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The model developed in this paper extends Bongaarts's nuclear family model into a general one that accounts for both nuclear and three-generation families, and which is expected to be more widely applicable. In the paper a simulation and comparison of two cohorts of women who are assumed to live out their lives under demographic conditions of China in 1950-70 and 1981 is presented. The status distribution and expected years spent in different parities, marital statuses, being the child of surviving parent(s), being a parent of living children, and having responsibility for both elderly parent(s) and young children etc. are given. The consequences of the dramatic demographic changes are clearly demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inverse projection and back projection are two methods for exploiting long historical series of births and deaths to produce estimates of population size and age structure, net migration, and vital rates. While inverse projection requires extraneous information on population size at scattered dates, back projection does not. In this paper I argue that back projection attempts an impossible task, and can only arbitrarily select one demographic past from among an infinite set of equally plausible and acceptable ones, which are also consistent with the input data. inverse projection, on the other hand, is more modest in its goal, but is robust and straightforward. In an important and outstanding book, Wrigley and Schofield use back projection to reconstruct English demographic history from 1539 to 1871. In this paper, inverse projection is used to replicate their reconstruction under assumptions that are in important respects weaker, although these estimates are contingent on independent population size estimates for 1541 and 1696. The results buttress Wrigley and Schofield's reconstruction. However, it is argued that their data and reconstruction cannot offer independent evidence for the general levels of population before the mid-eighteenth century; rather, they help us to interpolate among benchmarks for which we have extraneous evidence, and contingent on these benchmarks, fill in the rich details of the demographic past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study presented in this paper is an examination of the long-term impact of genocide during the period of the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–79) in Cambodia. The very high and selective mortality of the period had a major impact on the population structure of Cambodia. Fertility and marriage rates were both very low under the Khmer Rouge, but recovered immediately after the regime's collapse. Because of the shortage of eligible men, the age and education differences between partners tended to decline. The period also had a lasting impact on the educational attainment of the population. The school system collapsed during the period and therefore individuals—especially men—who were of school age at the time have a lower educational attainment than those from the preceding and subsequent birth cohorts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Between 1951 and 1998, the United Nations (UN) published 16 sets of population projections for the world, its major regions, and countries. This paper reports the accuracy of the projection results. I analyse the quality of the historical data used for the base populations of the projections, and for extrapolating fertility and mortality. I study also the impact this quality has had on the accuracy of the projection results. Results and assumptions for the sets of projections are compared with corresponding estimates from the UN 1998 Revision for total fertility and life expectancy at birth, total population, and the projected age structures. The report covers seven major regions (Africa, Asia, the former USSR, Europe, Northern America, Latin America, and Oceania) and the largest ten countries of the world as of 1998 (China, India, the USA, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Russia, Japan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few long-term statistical series exist that can document the mortality transition in Africa. This paper uses data from the parish registers of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Namibia to study mortality in Ovamboland between 1930 and 1990. The paper identifies significant discontinuities and reversals in the trend in mortality. Much of the mortality transition occurred in a rapid breakthrough concentrated between the early 1950s and early 1960s. Adult mortality fell more than existing model life tables would predict and the pattern of relatively high early-age mortality typical of modern Africa emerged only at this time. While a range of developments in Ovamboland contributed to the overall decline in mortality, the most important factor was the establishment, by the Finnish Mission, of a Western system of health care. In Ovamboland, the drive to 'good health at low cost' was articulated not through political institutions but through the church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution to the study of the literacy transition in Britain, Ireland, and Australia also touches on the relationship between literacy and international migration. Some 20,000 emigrants arrived in Australia in 1841 and their literacy is here established at the individual level, and then related to regional origins, occupations, religion, sex, and family status in the British Isles. The new Australian data offer unusual evidence to juxtapose with the prevailing account of British and Irish literacy. The paper makes systematic comparisons of the immigrant evidence with existing literacy findings for the populations of England and Wales, of Ireland, and the colonial population of Australia in the year 1841. The results also show extraordinary similarity of rank orderings between the Australian data and the conventional sources. The results show that the immigrants were consistently more literate than the home and the receiving populations and indicate a substantial link between migration and literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of mortality by cause usually relies on groups of causes created by consolidating items from the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). However, this type of grouping is not a very efficient means of describing the real trends in pathological processes. In this paper an alternative classification based on aetiological definitions is proposed. Redistributing deaths between eight aetiological categories offers a different perception of the main determinants of health transition and of mortality prospects. It also provides a view of inter-country differences which may help explain recent variation in trends. It is regrettable that, in the tenth revision of the International Classification of Diseases, the World Health Organisation (WHO) did not adopt the idea of a dual classification system combining an anatomical axis with an aetiological one. The present paper, it is hoped, will encourage further developments in this direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Population estimates play an important role in the allocation of resources at many levels of government and commerce but little is known about the accuracy of age-specific population estimates. Such knowledge is crucial, as resource allocation is often targeted at populations of particular age, and decisions need to be based on the reliability of the estimates. This paper presents a multi-level statistical analysis of the accuracy of age-specific population estimates made for British local authorities in 1991. The aim of this work is to identify the factors that influence accuracy, and to investigate how these influences interact. Our analyses show that the following area characteristics are key factors: true population size; intercensal population change; and percentages of unemployed residents, armed forces residents, and students. In addition, we find that the overall type of method used to calculate estimates is important, and that its effect varies both with area characteristics and with age-group. Local census methods are found to be generally superior, but a low-cost apportionment method, if implemented well, may be as effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we study the effects of short-term fluctuations in indicators of economic well-being on selected demographic response such as births, marriages and deaths at age intervals in eleven Latin American countries between 1910 and 1990. We use conventional distributed lag models to assess the magnitude and direction of effects and test a variety of hypotheses some of which have been posed to hold in Western Europe and others that are more specific and tailored to the Latin American context. We also compare the magnitude and direction of effects obtained among these countries with those obtained for preeindustrial Europe and uncover the existence of broadly similar patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Part I of this paper (published in the previous issue) we outlined the major contrasts in demographic experience between almost all areas of Scotland and most of England during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We also demonstrated the existence of significant regional differences within Scotland. In Part II. interpretations are offered for these various contrasts in experience. Four Scottish regional case studies are examined, each of which shows a different combination of nuptiality, marital fertility and out-migration. In studying each case, stress is laid on the ways in which the prevailing demographic regime, if it is examined as an interrelated whole, can be seen as involving highly appropriate adjustments to the ecological, economic, and institutional contexts of the region. In this approach, `innovation' aspects of the fertility decline are therefore played down: instead, for some parts of the country in particular, continued very high fertility among those who married is seen as a highly rational response to particular local social and economic situations which also encouraged very low nuptiality, and moderate or high levels of out-migration. The much lower nuptiality in Scotland compared to England is explained in part by reference to constraints on access to housing and the very limited availability of any support from the Poor Law, and in part through limited economic opportunities in a more slowly growing economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The changing relationship between infant, early childhood and adult mortality under conditions where life expectancy at birth is very low is considered in this paper. The feasibility of predicting life expectancy at birth from the infant mortality rate, and conversely, is discussed by considering the circumstances under which infant, early childhood, and adult mortality may vary independently of one another. The implications of using the Princeton regional model life tables in circumstances where adult mortality must be used to estimate infant mortality (East Asia) and infant mortality to judge adult mortality (European populations) are discussed. Attention is also given to the nature of distinctive cause-specific age-at-death patterns, and the effects they may have on the balance between infant and early childhood mortality during the historical epidemiological transition. The paper concludes by outlining some of the implications for research on mortality levels in contemporary Third-World populations, especially the debate over the relative influence of medical intervention and socio-economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dowries in most regions of South Asia have steadily become larger over the last 40 years, causing widespread destitution among families with daughters to be married. This paper attempts to investigate the reasons behind dowry `inflation' with data on marriage transactions and other individual and household information from six villages in south- central India, and from the Indian census. It is found that a 'marriage squeeze' caused by population growth which resulted in a surplus of younger women in the marriage market, has played an important role in the increase in dowries. Other factors that increase the size of dowries include differences in the land holdings of the parental households, and residence in regions in the more northerly parts of India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demographic projection models describe the development over time of the population in terms of events. A consistency problem arises if projected numbers of events are required to satisfy certain constraints: the consistency problem can be seen as a generalization of the well-known two-sex problem in nuptiality models. This paper presents a very general characterization of consistency problems, using matrix notation, as well as a slightly less general algorithm to solve them. The preferred specification of the objective function to be minimized by the algorithm leads to a solution that can be interpreted as a generalization of the harmonic-mean approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The orphanhood method has proved an important source of adult mortality estimates in countries without adequate vital registration systems, but produces rather out-of-date results and is prone to under-reporting of orphanhood at young ages (the 'adoption effect'). In this paper we investigate whether a brief and straightforward supplementary question about the timing of the deaths of women's parents relative to first marriage can be used to study these problems. Coefficients are presented for estimating adult mortality from maternal and paternal orphanhood before and since marriage. Estimation of the time location of the results is discussed, and the methods are applied to data from Morocco, Burundi and Uganda. The results are promising. Data on orphanhood since marriage reflect more recent mortality than lifetime data and are less subject to the adoption effect. When it is accurately reported, information on orphanhood before marriage yields a series of mortality estimates that extends back at least 30 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the second part of this paper we take up some of the issues that were raised in the first, and suggest some explanations for the regularities identified in the pattern of infant- mortality decline. We begin by considering contemporary analyses of the infant- mortality problems especially under the headings of sanitary conditions and maternal care. We also deal with the relationships between fertility decline, improvements in women's education and living standards, and the decline of infant mortality. In the final section we provide an extensive summary and discussion of the whole paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents views of the author on the paper related to relation between the actual growth rate of any population and its intrinsic rate of natural increase, by Samuel Preston, published in November 1988 issue of the journal "Population Studies." The author says that according to the paper the momentum of population growth is entirely confined to the age span above T number. In a population whose vital rates have suddenly changed to stationary levels, those younger than T number neither more nor less than they will number in the ultimate stationary population.

The object of this paper is to assess how far developments in the labour market can help to explain the fluctuations in births which have been recorded in England and Wales between 1952 and 1980. We examine separately the period rate of women from each of the first four parities proceeding to another birth. Our analysis shows that different birth orders respond differently to economic variables, and that women of different ages but the same parity respond differently. We have found that growing real wages for both men and women tend to deter older parents from adding to existing families. During the early stages of family building, births are inhibited by labour markets favourable to women. But conditions in the labour market for men have the opposite effect on early breeding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates that, to a close approximation, the intrinsic growth rate of a population is equal to the mean of age-specific growth rates below age T, the mean length of a generation. This mean is normally close to the growth rate of the entire population block below age T. Therefore, when a disparity exists between the intrinsic growth rate and the actual growth rate of a population (whether or not net migration is included in both rates), it must be attributable to an unusual growth rate of the population block above age T. One implication is that the 'momentum of population growth' is entirely confined to the age span above T, approximately age 28 in developing countries to-day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In ordinary demographic projection, the starting age structure of a population ceases to matter after a time, whatever changes the birth and death rates undergo within bounds. The inhomogeneous or 'weak' ergodic theorem asserts this eventual independence of starting state. Does the same independence hold true for inverse projection? This paper proves that the answer is 'yes' provided the model life-table family satisfies certain reasonable conditions, but that the answer can be 'no', if more extreme life-table families are allowed. The inhomogeneous ergodic theorem for inverse projection proved here, and the counter-examples to its extension, have implications for the validation of aggregative reconstructions in historical demography and to the contemporary forecasting of sub-populations subject to constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary aim of the paper is to investigate whether the observed increase in the crude birth rate of Egypt between 1973 and 1979 which followed years of decline reflects a genuine fertility increase during this period. Specifically the question considered was, since other possible reasons behind the trends connected with the wars of 1967 and 1973 were not fully satisfactory, to what extent demographic factors could have influenced the trends in the crude birth rate during the 1960s and 1970s? A study of the impact of structural factors necessitated dealing with a longer period, with levels and trends in mortality as well as fertility, and with estimation of the age-sex structure. The analysis shows that to a large extent the fall and rise in the crude birth rate can be explained by the effect on the age structure of past mortality trends, particularly of the rapid decline that took place during the late 1940s. These trends, even in the absence of any change in fertility, would cause the crude birth rate to decline to a low point during the early 1970s, increase and then decline again during the early 1980s. Fertility changes that seem to have taken place during the 1940s would further deepen the decline of the crude birth rate during the early 1970s and augment the increase during the late 1970s. The slight increase in age at marriage and in contraceptive practice have probably also contributed to the trend. Accordingly, the trend in the crude birth rate during the last two decades could have been anticipated on demographic grounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information related to demographic and socioeeconomic influences on recent Marital Breakdown in Great Britain. in this paper marital breakdown will be taken to refer to separation or divorce, whichever occurs earlier, and hence excludes termination through death of a spouse (or those cases where a couple continue to live together but the marriage is effectively `dead'). The main source of information on marital breakdown has hitherto been official divorce statistics. These statistics are not collected for demographic purposes and are subject to a number of problems; in particular, a marriage may break down without being ended by a formal divorce and even if there is a divorce, it may occur some time after the de facto breakdown and hence underestimate the frequency of breakdown: these problems are exacerbated when trends are considered and the availability and timing of divorce are heavily influenced by legal and administrative changes. A second major disadvantage of divorce statistics is that the number of socio-economic and demographic variables available for analysis is very limited: they generally include age at and duration of marriage, presence of children (legally rather than biologically defined) and, occasionally, social class. Data on judicial separations relate to only a fraction of actual separations, and are worthless as indicators of levels and trends in separation.

In this paper a theory of marital fertility transition that treats birth control diffusion processes and the effects of mortality decline and economic and social development on fertility within a common analytical framework is developed. Utility-cost concepts provide the means for an integrated treatment. Family size utility functions are used and the theory is focused on the effects of development and diffusion on the utilities and costs of alternative family sizes. The principal innovation lies in the conceptualization and analysis of diffusion of birth control, in which the psychic costs of violating social norms against birth control play a central role. When norms shift in favour of birth control, the psychic costs of birth control fall, causing a decline in the demand for children. In highly integrated populations this process can occur very rapidly, resulting in rapid diffusion of birth control and sudden and rapid fertility decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of levels of life expectancy and their patterns of change among six socio-economically differentiated sub-populations of England and Wales for the period 1851-1911. Differences in mortality levels among these sub-groups and their rates of change are analyzed with respect to three groups of explanatory variables, viz., environmental, stratification and demographic variables. Their relative importance for different periods is assessed and discussed. The findings show consistency with two previous studies, which have suggested that medical advances had little effect on the increase in life expectancy during the second half of the nineteenth century. The present paper supports the results of one study in that public health measures affected life expectancies earlier, while subsequently, the increase in standards of living was more important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research on the relationship between extended family residence and fertility has produced conflicting findings. In the present paper, we avoid a major shortcoming of past work by focusing on residence and fertility at a given stage of the life-cycle, i.e. the stage following first marriage. Results show that residence with husband's parents reduces age at marriage. Residence with wife's parents shows no such consistent effect. No evidence was found to support the claim that extended family residence consistently affects the length of the interval between marriage and the first birth. These findings are consistent across four cultural/ethnic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on population dynamics which is based on birth intervals and parity progression. The parity progression model developed in this paper enables you to calculate the future population that will result from the operation of a given set of parity progression ratios and birth-interval distributions on an initial series of births distributed by order, just as the conventional method of population projection allows you to calculate the future population that will result from the operation of given age-schedules of fertility and mortality on an initial age distribution. The parity progression model embodies an approach to the measurement of fertility which is based on parity progression schedules, just as Lotka's model is based on age-specific birth rates. Parity progression schedules which incorporate parity progression rates and birth-interval distributions are arguably the most natural approach to the measurement of fertility. When people think about having children, they think in terms of whether or not and when to have a first or a subsequent birth.

This article focuses on the present value of population growth in the western world. At the centre of any analysis of the effect of additional population on income through the production of technical knowledge is this indigestible kernel: no matter how small the contribution to technology of the additional individual, it will some day, though perhaps a long time ahead, inevitably lead to income per head being higher than it would otherwise have been, ceteris paribus. There is also a sub-plot to the story. In a modern society, workers' transfers of income to retired persons are large in comparison to transfers to children. This means that any given individual benefits if some other individual has more children, ceteris paribus; this effect raises the discount rate at which the present value of population growth is positive above what it would otherwise be in any given model. This paper concentrates on the main argument, however. In the calculations, transfers to retired persons and for child services are disregarded as are negative environmental adjustment costs, positive environmental externalities of all sorts, especially those that decrease the entropy of the earth, and changes in work and savings patterns due to larger numbers of dependants.

It is well known that estimates of infant mortality obtained using W. Brass's technique are very accurate. Biases are introduced, however, when one or more of the assumptions on which it relies are violated. Departures from the assumption of constant fertility may be handled by using a variant of the technique which depends on information on the age distribution of surviving children, rather than on indexes of the fertility function. Violations of the assumption of constant mortality produce upward biases in the estimates. The amount of bias is a function of the speed of mortality decline, the characteristics of the fertility pattern and, finally, of the age of the mother. This paper presents a simple technique which corrects these biases, and in addition, generates estimates of the parameters of the mortality trend. It differs from others in that it uses a cohort definition of mortality decline and relies on knowledge of the age structure of surviving children rather than on indexes of the fertility pattern.

This paper was developed with two purposes in mind: first to extend the study of the family life cycle for this sub-population on the United States back to the 1800 birth cohort and secondly to examine the features of the family life cycle under conditions of high natural fertility. Evidence Consistent with a natural-fertility regime is presented using Mormon genealogies of married women who were born between 1800 and 1869. The family life cycle for this high-fertility population indicates how the reproductive potential of a population is tempered by life-cycle phenomena. Age at marriage greatly affects completed family size: Women who married by the age of 20 average about nine live births against an average of only six for women married at age 25. However. the age at birth of the last child is high and unrelated to age at marriage as would be expected under conditions of natural fertility. By using direct information on the age at death for these couples. we find that the average age at dissolution of the conjugal unit has not varied by more than a few years and has consistently been in the mid 60's. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an earlier paper in this Journal this author presented a working model of marital fertility. The present paper examines how far that model is capable of serving as a `binder' for the diverse analytical hypotheses and interpretative schemes flow available in the literature on marital fertility differentials. More specifically, this paper attempts to identify the underlying explanatory factors and principles of a number of analytical hypotheses concerning fertility differentials and tests covered by the working model presented in the earlier paper. Although it cannot be claimed that this paper presents an exhaustive review of the explanatory analysis of human fertility, the results of the present exercise indicate that the working model in question is capable of serving as a `binder' for most of the important analytical hypotheses and interpretative schemes so far advanced by fertility research workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the Monte Carlo model for simulating the reproductive history of a cohort of women is described in detail. The purposes of the model are both substantive and methodological, since it investigates the quantitative effects on reproductive performance of changes in such factors as mortality, marriage patterns, use of contraceptives and their effectiveness, size of family desired, fecundity and pregnancy wastage. The paper consists of five sections: a discussion of problems to which the model is directed, a brief description of population models, a description of the present model, a presentation of some illustrative results, and a discussion of the possible role of the model.

This paper re-examines the matter of rural-urban fertility differentials in India. It is a commonplace that urban fertility is lower than rural fertility in the West, and it is frequently assumed that this holds for non-Western populations as well. In the case of India, previous studies of rural-urban fertility ratios have appeared to bear out this expectation. However, fertility ratios based on the most recent available age distributions show no significant rural-urban fertility differentials. This conclusion is supported by several recent sample surveys of children ever born and is consistent with the generally accepted fact that contraception is negligible even in the cities of India. It is noted that the virtual disappearance of the Indian rural-urban fertility ratio differential over time has in all likelihood resulted from a narrowing of the rural-urban infant and child mortality differential.

Estimates of mortality rates and expectation of life at birth, using infant mortality rates, are examined on the basis of 50 life tables for both sexes. Least squares linear estimates are given as well as estimates of their variances. Model life table calculations, as proposed by the U.N. Population Branch, are then compared with these unbiased minimum variance estimates and shown to overestimate the expectation of life by more than two years on the average, and to be at most 68 % efficient. Though better estimates are provided in this paper, their variance is still so large as to cast doubt on the practical usefulness of any estimates based exclusively on infant mortality rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the reply of the author and co-authors to an article about the analysis of differences in the fertility patterns between national populations and over time. In their comments to our paper Osona and Kohler make a number of interesting and potentially helpful points. While their comments do not, in general, appear to be in conflict with our opinions, we are concerned that they have misunderstood one specific point. In their first section, on the analytical relationship between Hadwiger parameters and demographic measures, the authors re-present some known results. Those results, of course, were not the essential point of our paper, which was concerned primarily with the analysis of differences in fertility patterns. The functions were fitted in order to gain understanding of the differences in the patterns between countries and periods. The correspondences between variables to which they refer were used in order to investigate the effects of departures from the models in cases of distorted distributions. In their section dealing with reparameterization the authors propose an alternative to our presentation of the Hadwiger mixture model. Their explicit interpretation of the Hadwiger parameters as the total fertility, the mean age at childbearing, and the variance of the fertility schedule is possibly a step forward for the use of the model in demography.

The article discusses the effect of changes in age-specific mortality rates on life expectancy. The research paper by author James W. Vaupel about the effect of changes in age-specific mortality rates on life expectancy has prompted how increasingly difficult it is becoming to keep abreast of the scientific findings that are being published all over the world even in respective specialties. However, the specific question attempted to answer in his paper, namely, the age interval in which the reduction of deaths by a fixed percentage will result in the maximum gain in life expectancy, is an interesting one. The solution of an equation obtained by setting the derivative of function equal to zero gives the values of the variable at which the function assumes its local maximum and/or minimum which may not be absolute over the entire range of variation of the variable. The determination of age interval corresponding to the minimum gain in life expectancy is no less interesting than the other where the gain turns out to be the largest.

This paper presents estimates of the level and trend of the fertility of different ethnic minorities in the UK from the 1960s up to 2006. The fertility estimates are derived primarily from the Labour Force Survey using the Own-Child method, with additional information from the General Household Survey and vital registration data. Comparisons are made between the level of fertility of UK-born and immigrant mothers from minority groups, and the fertility of the populations in the country of origin. Total fertility in all groups has fallen from levels that were initially relatively high. That of some UK ethnic groups has already fallen to about the level of the UK national average (e.g., black Caribbean) or below it (e.g., Indian and Chinese). Only among Pakistani and Bangladeshi women does total fertility remain substantially above the national average despite a continuous decrease over the last 20 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports a provincial-level analysis of the way in which various socio-economic and socio-demographic determinants influence the decision to discriminate against daughters in China. While most existing studies use the infant or child sex ratio as the only variable to be explained, this study analyses separately the two main discriminatory practices: sex-selective abortion (with sex ratio at birth as a proxy) and neglect of girls' health care (with excess infant mortality among females as a proxy). The analysis helps to illuminate the circumstances that encourage sex-selective behaviours, which appear to be dictated mainly by extreme poverty, family support to the elderly, and father's education, together with the social pressure on couples to adhere to traditional values and roles and the constraints on family size. While sex-selective abortion appears to result from long-term strategies to optimize family composition, lethal neglect is the immediate result of economic constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on population history are often based on incomplete records of life histories. For instance, in studies using data obtained from family reconstitution, the date of death is right censored (by migration) and the censoring time is never observed. Several methods for the correction of mortality estimates are proposed in the literature, most of which first estimate the number of individuals at risk and then use standard techniques to estimate mortality. Other methods are based on statistical models. In this paper all methods are reviewed, and their merits are compared by applying them to simulated and to seventeenth-century data from the English parish of Reigate. An ad hoc method proposed by Ruggles performs reasonably well. Methods based on statistical models, provided they are sufficiently realistic, give comparable accuracy and allow the estimation of several other quantities of interest, such as the distribution of migration times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an empirical and analytic foundation for regarding period life expectancy as a lagged indicator of the experience of real cohorts in populations experiencing steady improvement in mortality. We find that current period life expectancy in the industrialized world applies to cohorts born some 40-50 years ago. Lags track an average age at which future years of life are being gained, in a sense that we make precise. Our findings augment Ryder's classic results on period-cohort translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the past transition from low to high fertility which, in Indonesia as elsewhere, preceded the return to lower birth rates. Data from two parts of the island of Sulawesi where fertility rose during the colonial period are used to explain both why it rose, and why it was originally low. Economic conditions, it is argued, were the most important factors, affecting fertility via the supply of income and the demand for labour. Two schematic models of the 'first fertility transition' are proposed. In areas with low population densities and area-extensive forms of agriculture responsive to commercial stimuli, birth rates rose as the growth of commerce raised levels of prosperity, facilitated marriage, and undermined institutions such as debt-slavery which had previously acted to restrict marital fertility. In densely populated areas with labour-intensive agriculture and heavy state taxation in labour, fertility rose in response to demands for women's (and possibly child) labour that did not necessarily lead to gains in income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars have argued that deliberate birth spacing may have played a role before and during the modern fertility transition. There are good historical and theoretical reasons for this view, but it has proved to be hard to demonstrate convincingly that birth intervals were in fact partly determined by attempts at deliberate fertility control. This paper suggests a method of securing evidence on the issue for married couples. The method is applied to three cohorts living in a Belgian town in the nineteenth century. The findings indicate that, even before the fertility transition, couples in the working class were controlling their fertility by deliberate spacing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inadequate data and apartheid policies have meant that, until recently, most demographers have not had the opportunity to investigate the level of, and trend in, the fertility of South African women. The 1996 South Africa Census and the 1998 Demographic and Health Survey provide the first widely available and nationally representative demographic data on South Africa since 1970. Using these data, this paper describes the South African fertility decline from 1955 to 1996. Having identified and adjusted for several errors in the 1996 Census data, the paper argues that total fertility at that time was 3.2 children per woman nationally, and 3.5 children per woman for African South Africans. These levels are lower than in any other sub-Saharan African country. We show also that fertility in South Africa has been falling since the 1960s. Thus, fertility transition predates the establishment of a family planning programme in the country in 1974. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to two ongoing debates among demographers. One deals with the immediate and deferred health effects of childbearing in the past, and the other with competing explanations--the frailty and insult accumulation hypotheses--for differences in individual health later in life. The study population consists of working women who lived at four locales in England and Wales in parts of the period 1778-1929 and who were under observation for incapacitating sickness during and after their childbearing years. Mothers within the study population are contrasted with a comparison group made up principally of non-mothers. The mothers began their reproductive careers with an advantage in health that was especially evident in the duration of sickness episodes. Even though individual births were less hazardous than individual sicknesses at the same ages, the cumulative effect of childbearing appears to have eroded the mothers' advantage. By ages 50-74 the mothers resembled the comparison group in health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]