The Urbanisation Penalty

The Urbanisation Penalty

In their new paper Catalina Torres and co-authors look back to the beginnings of urbanisation in Scotland and quantify the penalty of urbanisation.

In their new paper Catalina Torres and co-authors look back to the beginnings of urbanisation in Scotland and quantify the penalty of urbanisation. They quantify not only the direct toll paid by urban inhabitants exposed directly to the unsanitary and hazardous environment in the form of higher mortality, but they also quantify the effects of changing population redistribution on total life expectancy in Scotland between 1861 and 1910.

News: Alberto Palloni to Join the Spanish National Research Council

Alberto Palloni to Join the Spanish National Research Council

Press Release: Alberto Palloni will coordinate a new ERC Advanced project at CSIC that will demonstrate the theories linking developmental biology, epigenetics and human health and mortality

Palloni will join the Institute of Economics, Geography and Demography (IEGD) thanks to the support of the European Research Council (ERC) through an Advanced Grant called ‘Early conditions, delayed adult effects and morbidity, disability and mortality in modern human populations' (ECHO).

Parents Tend to Live Longer than Childless Individuals – Why is That?

Parents Tend to Live Longer than Childless Individuals – Why is That?

Childless men and women have an overall higher mortality than adults with children, meaning that they die earlier, recent studies show. Mothers and fathers with two biological children have the lowest mortality risks, but it increases for parents with three or more biological children. What are the explanations for the relationship between having children and mortality risks?
Social Inequalities in Mortality

Social Inequalities in Mortality

The increasing advantage of the married
Download Population & Policy Compact 16/2018 (783.74 KB)
Key Messages Married individuals live longer than the non-married, and in Norway and some other countries, this mortality gap has become larger over recent decades. Among the never-married in Norway, mortality did not fall over the last decades of the 20th century, and in 2005-08, mortality was as high for them as it was for the married three decades earlier.

It is widely known that better educated persons tend to live longer than the less educated. There is apparently less public and political awareness of the fact that marital status is also strongly associated with mortality. Yet, hundreds of studies carried out over more than 150 years have shown that those who are married have better health and live longer than those who are never-married, divorced or widowed. In combination with the large proportion of non-married in European countries, and the likely future increase, such a gap in health and mortality between married and non-married persons may be seen as a major public health challenge. The situation will be particularly worrying if the mortality disadvantage of the non-married increases, as it has done over recent decades in several countries.

Books and Reports: Visualizing Mortality Dynamics in the Lexis Diagram

Visualizing Mortality Dynamics in the Lexis Diagram

This book visualizes mortality dynamics in the Lexis diagram. While the standard approach of plotting death rates is also covered, the focus in this book is on the depiction of rates of mortality improvement over age and time. This rather novel approach offers a more intuitive understanding of the underlying dynamics, enabling readers to better understand whether period- or cohort-effects were instrumental for the development of mortality in a particular country.
Why Do Women Live Longer Than Men?

Why Do Women Live Longer Than Men?

Women live longer than men almost anywhere in the world. The question is whether this is due primarily to behavioural differences and social factors, or whether biological factors also play a role. To better understand the female survival advantage, Zarulli et al. (2018) investigated the survival of men and women in seven populations under extreme conditions due to famines, epidemics and slavery. They found that even when mortality was very high, women lived longer on average than men.
Books and Reports: Sweet Child of Mine

Sweet Child of Mine

This book focuses on child mortality, and mainly on infant and neonatal mortality, during the 19th century in Veneto, Northeastern Italy. In this region the levels of infant mortality during the period 1750-1850 are among the highest ever recorded for a large area over a long period. This peculiar characteristic is mainly due to the exceptionally high neonatal winter mortality. Following this period, however, infant mortality steadily began to decline.
Can Education Help You Live longer?

Can Education Help You Live longer?

An analysis of 17 European countries
Past research has found that mortality is typically lower among those with a more advantageous socioeconomic position. The "fundamental causes" theory argues that it is the material and non-material resources associated with higher socioeconomic position, such as income, access to knowledge and social connections, that helps these individuals avoid disease, which leads to health inequalities. Johan P. Mackenbach and colleagues tested this theory to see if declines in mortality are greater among those with a higher socioeconomic position.
News: Women in East Germany forecasted to be more likely to die from smoking than in West Germany

Women in East Germany forecasted to be more likely to die from smoking than in West Germany

New study from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
East German women are running the risk of an unforeseen increase in deaths through smoking, forecasts up to the year 2036 by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock show. The researchers have published their findings in the leading journal on population trends, Demography.
Adult Mortality Patterns in the Former Soviet Union’s Southern Tier

Adult Mortality Patterns in the Former Soviet Union’s Southern Tier

Armenia and Georgia in comparative perspective
Mortality trends in former Soviet Republics differ substantially among countries. While these trends have been well-documented for Russia and other northern former Soviet Republics, little is known about countries located in the southern tier of the region. To begin to fill this gap, Duthé et al. (2017) present evidence from Georgia and Armenia and compare it with countries which we know more about, namely Kyrgyzstan and Russia. Results show that Armenia and Georgia have similar levels of adult mortality as Kyrgystan.
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