We analyzed data that were collected continuously between 1950 and 1974 from a rural area of the Gambia to determine the effects of kin on child mortality. Multilevel event-history models were used to demonstrate that having a living mother, maternal grandmother, or elder sisters had a significant positive effect on the survival probabilities of children, whereas having a living father, paterna...

This paper investigates the impact of subsistence consumption and extrinsic and intrinsic causes of child mortality on fertility and child expenditure. It offers a theory for why mankind multiplies at higher rates at geographically unfavorable, tropical locations. Placed into a macroeconomic framework this behavior creates an indirect channel through which geography shapes economic performance....

The relative importance of cohorts' early-life conditions, compared to later period conditions, on adult and old-age mortality is not known. This article studies how cohort-level mortality depends on shocks in cohorts' early- and later-life (period) conditions. I use cohorts' own mortality as a proxy for the early-life conditions, and define shocks as deviations from trend. Using historical dat...

Programs to reduce mortality among women and children are the target of new resources and redoubled commitment as the 2015 date for achieving the Millennium Development Goals approaches. The need for a common evaluation framework to guide the collection, analysis and synthesis of evidence is increasingly evident. This paper presents such a framework in four parts: (1) a conceptual model for the...

A persistent theme in much anthropological writing is the concept of the deliberate control of population numbers by hunter-gatherers as a means of achieving moderate family size, adequate nutrition, and constrained adult mortality. An analysis of the mix of theory and field evidence that led to this conclusion finds the case not proven. On the contrary, Malthusian constraints can operate, and ...

Data from the national Peru Fertility Survey are used to estimate infant and childhood mortality ratios, 1968--77, for 124 Peruvian communities, ranging from small Indian hamlets in the Andes to larger cities on the Pacific coast. Significant mortality variations are found: mortality is inversely related to community population size and is higher in the mountains than in the jungle or coast. Mu...

Tanzania was one of the countries included in a Multi Country Evaluation (MCE) of Integrated Management of Childhood Illnesses (IMCI), coordinated by WHO in 1999-2002. The MCE found that IMCI improved of care for children under 5 years of age, reduced child mortality by 13% and was cost-effective at al, 2004). However, a decade after the introduction of IMCI in Tanzania, training of health work...

Research on malnutrition typically focuses on extreme cases which pose the greatest individual health risks, but researchers comparing populations might find that variation in mild malnutrition conveys valuable information about public health. This paper constructs and compares new measures of the prevalence, depth and severity of both mild and extreme underweight in children from three months ...

Child mortality, defined here as mortality under age five, is not evenly distributed but found in clusters. In a contemporary polygamous population in Ghana with extended families, we separate clustering at the parental and household levels, which are often overlapping and inseparable in other historical studies. For eight years, we followed 28,994 individuals, including 9,288 children under th...