Crisis mortality: documenting the effects of conflict, famines and natural disasters

This study examines the way in which economic hardship of North Korea has affected population dynamics since the 1990s. The effects of food shortage on vital statistics such as fertility, mortality, and migration and population structure are estimated. Data for population estimate used the North Korea’s two censuses of 1993 and 2008, sample surveys with defectors from North Korea living in South Korea and in-depth interview with several respondents.
The result highlights that the effect of North Korea’s food shortage on the population dynamics has at least lasted until 2008. Economic hardship of North Korea was not a short term or accidental shock rather it was a long term and chronic suffering, under which many people lost their life, interrupted their reproduction and escaped the country for their survival. amount of population loss due to the economic hardship was estimated to be amount to 880,000 persons between 1993 and 2008. Among this population loss, about 490,000 people were lost due to mortality increase, about 290,000 were lost due to fertility decline, and about 100,000 were lost due to exodus and its effect on fertility decline.

To assess excess deaths linked to the 1998-2004 armed conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the International Rescue Committee conducted a series of five surveys over a seven years period (2000–2007). IRC estimated excess deaths of 5.4 million between 1998 and 2007. Using an alternative method this study combines four different data sources – 1984 DRC Population Census; 1995 and 2001 Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys and the 2007 Demographic and Health Survey – to assess excess population loss. Indirect techniques are used to derive estimates and cohort component projections conducted for factual and counter-factual scenarios using varying assumptions to estimate excess population loss. This study’s excess population loss is estimated at: 2.4 million for a closed population; 1.7 million when migration data in incorporated. We also find that the choice of mortality baseline determines the level of excess population loss. Mortality is exceptionally high in the DRC regardless of baseline or assumptions used. Further works are on-going to refine assumptions and assess competing causes of mortality as well as the extent of uncertainty linked to both this study’s model and components of population change.

Investigating the effect of mortality shocks on humans is difficult in the absence of the possibility to set up laboratory experiments. However, some events in the human history serve as natural experiments.
This paper aims to analyze whether sudden changes in external conditions affect the slope of the mortality curve or shift the curve upwards proportionally at all ages.
Two cases of natural mortality experiments are presented and used for the analysis: Australian civilian prisoners during WWII in a Japanese camp and the Ukrainian Famine in 1933.
The death rates of the POWs were higher during the imprisonment but the slope of the curve appeared not to have changed compared to the normal mortality regime. During the Ukrainian Famine, instead, the curves for different years of famine converged at old ages. The results found evidence that selection could be the cause of the convergence.

Conflict and civil war are part of African history. First, was the resistance to colonization and the armed struggles that led to the independence of many African countries in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Second, after their independences many African countries have been involved in civil wars, mainly rooted in ideological and political contradictions, and ethno-regional frictions. Beside the economic, political and social consequences, these conflicts have affected the demographic outcome through disruption of people’s lives due to large-scale property destruction, looting and forced migration and famine. Studies worldwide have shown that in wartime mortality may increase because of direct civilian killings and increase in preventable diseases due to disruption of health and transportation systems. Fertility may experience drops during wartime and rebounds in a post-war period due to delayed marriage and spousal separation during the wartime. This paper applies indirect estimation techniques on pre- and post conflict census data, under-five mortality and fertility changes that may be related to conflict in Mozambique and Rwanda. The analysis shows that in both Mozambique and Rwanda population growth, fertility and under-five mortality were affected by the conflict, but the nature, duration and characteristics of the conflict.

This paper explores a contemporary political-demographic event occurred in 1988 Iraqi Kurdistan under ruling Saddam Hussein which is called Anfal. It appeared not only as a political and military event, but also as a demographic crisis. About 182000 people were dead and the number of refugees exceeded much more than victims. A great invasion was conducted in two stages and eight attacks, from February to September 1988, including Halabja chemical bombardment. More than 4000 villages were completely destroyed and their residents were prohibited to go their homeland. Anfal brought about several socio-demographic consequences for Kurdish society including: increasing short–term mortality, forced rural-urban and international migration, increasing various diseases, increasing widow and orphaned population. The most important characteristic of Anfal was reflected in its gender – age strategies.
This paper, based on few statistical existing data and governmental and nongovernmental documents, tries to provide a clear description of this socio-demographic disaster,particularly mortality, and reconstruct it as crisis-based mortality.

Documenting the effects of conflict is impeded by data unavailability. Utilising data with retrospective questions addresses this challenge since it generates quasi-longitudinal information. Individual testimonies collected by Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRC) established in South Africa and Sierra Leone are characteristic of these types of data because they enable victims to retrospectively recount human rights abuses. The 2004 Sierra Leone TRC dataset exemplifies a unique human rights data, enabling researchers to document the effects of the Sierra Leone civil war, 1991-2002. The data emanated from testimonies by 7,706 Sierra Leoneans. It is a human rights database with seventeen categories of violations summarised to: killing, forced displacement, destruction of property, sexual violence, physical abuse, arbitrary detention, forced imprisonment and pillaging. Quantification of the testimonies resulted in 40,242 violations records. This study documents the effects of the conflict through geospatial mapping of violations at different administrative levels. The analysis is important because the effects of conflict are asymmetrically distributed across the regions affected. This paper asserts that regional differences in human rights violations underlie these variations in the post-war population distribution.

Objective: Given the recent increase of violence in Mexico we want to analyze the levels, trends and impact of mortality due to homicides between 2000 and 2010, at a national and state level. Material and Methods: Homicide mortality statistics from Mexico’s INEGI were used. We calculated the standardized mortality rates and the years of life lost (YLL) proposed by Arriaga between 15 and 49 years of age using an assumption of no mortality between the selected ages. Results: Between 2000 and 2007, a decreasing trend for the national mortality rates was observed (10.8 to 8.2 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants respectively); the same was presented with the YLL (a decrease of 23.95%). But in the last three years (2008-2010) the incidence of homicides increased significantly, reflected in both mortality rates (a 180.23% increase) and YLL (causing a decrease of 0.17 years in the national temporary life expectancy). Discussion: Mortality due to homicides has increased significantly in Mexico in recent years; this after a period of a continued decline in mortality for this cause at the beginning of the decade. However, these results don’t imply that violence is a generalized problem, given that we show that it concentrates mainly in some states.

This paper mainly aims at examining the mortality trends due to natural disasters such as earthquake, floods, cyclones etc in the five South Asian countries. The paper also makes attempts to identify the determinants of mortality levels due to natural disasters in these countries. The paper makes use of the available secondary data and reports including that of UN ESCAP publications, EM-DAT, WDI, FAO STAT etc. The types of disasters covered in the analysis include Hydro-Meteorological (hurricanes, floods, droughts) and Geo Physical (earthquakes, tsunami). The data used pertains to 1985-2009. Analysis is carried out to find out the association between the mortality due to disasters and economic and demographic characteristics of the countries.
India experienced more frequent disasters such as floods. There is steady increase in the number of disasters as well as total number of deaths due to disasters over the past two and half decades. The mortality due to disasters in South Asia was highest during 1990-94.
The number of disasters increased across the countries during the reference period. The mean number of deaths due to disasters increased in Afghanistan, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka..The number of deaths per disaster also increased,

The connections between mortality and fertility have far-reaching implications – for broad subjects like population growth, family building and increasingly, the study of natural disaster. Scholars have long posited familial mechanisms that raise fertility in response to mortality increase, including the “replacement” effect, in which parents increase fertility following a child’s death to achieve a desired family size. Despite having a strong theoretical foundation, the volitional replacement effect has slim empirical support. The gap in evidence is often attributed to the methodological challenge of identifying a causal, behavioral fertility response to shifts in mortality. We revisit the replacement question in the context of an unexpected environmental mortality shock: the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. We analyze detailed longitudinal, population-representative data collected before and after the tsunami in Indonesia. Using satellite measures of environmental destruction, we demonstrate a substantial and sustained fertility increase attributable to the tsunami. With data on fertility intentions, family mortality, and women’s completed fertility by 2009, we find robust evidence of a volitional replacement effect. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for disaster-afflicted populations.

In the first decade of the twenty first century the Mexican life expectancy changed from a long trend of increase to stagnation. These changes concur with an increase in deaths by homicides that the country experienced in that decade. There are 138,461 official reported deaths by homicide in the period of 2000 to 2010. However, the time trend shows an increase in the counts of homicides in the later years from an annual number of 10,000 to 25,000 deaths in 2010. We quantify the impact of these changes in homicides and other causes of death in life expectancy. Male life expectancy remained around the value of 72 years from 2000 to 2010. However, the apparent stagnation in life expectancy is resultant of increase in homicides and diabetes deaths on one hand, and the positive improvements observed in other causes of death on the other. The negative impact of homicides is particularly observed at ages 15 and 50, and diabetes for ages 45 and more, and they account for almost an entire year of the male life expectancy. Mexican males would have observed a 2 years increase in life expectancy if homicides and diabetes deaths had been avoided.