Gender differences in health and mortality

The present paper aims to assess the gender disparity in health expenditure among various age groups in different regions of India using Consumer Expenditure data collected in two rounds by National Sample Survey Organization (1999-2000 and 2007-08). Also the paper examines whether the change in the age and sex composition contributes to the change in health expenditure from the first survey period to the second survey period. Bivariate analysis is used to fulfil the first objective and to obtain the second objective Decomposition analysis is employed. Findings indicate that in India health expenditure has not increased over time and a huge disparity is seen between men and women of all age groups in getting health care facilities in different regions. Result from Decomposition analysis reveals that compositional shift in age contributes to increase in health expenditure, whereas compositional shift in female population contributes to decrease the health expenditure from the first to the second survey period. The study suggests that looking towards the gender disparity in health expenditure, Government should implement programmes addressing health care facilities in all the regions of India and emphasize should be given on women as they are the deprived group in getting health care services.

This study has explored the relationship between marital status and survival possibility with respect to both sexes using an indirect estimation. Several patterns emerge from the analysis of survival differentials by marital status. Any change in marital status often leads to a loss of socio economic status; particularly in the case of widows though differing across countries or states depending on the socio-cultural condition (e.g. widows in Kerala enjoy the same survival chance as married women, due to a better socio cultural landscape). Results show that marriage contributes to a larger increase in survival chance for both males and females. Changes in the marital status have deleterious implications for women as compared to men, as men always tends to remarry in the event of any change in the marital status. In India the joint survival likelihood depends on several factors like age at marriage, spousal age gap and men’s risky life styles. The studies on age at marriage and sex related differences in mortality rates point out a general age gap of five years between males and females and also male mortality especially adult male mortality is extremely high in India. However, in this study such factors have not been taken into consideration. The derived results strongly affirm that marriage circle expand survival chances.

Though high male mortality is considered to be a marker of negative demographic processes in Russia, situation with female mortality occurs to be less favourable.
The aim is to manifest the sources of unstable female mortality dynamics, age groups and death causes slowing down life expectancy growth in females during 2002-2010.
Mortality decreased by 15-23% depending upon age. In young and middle ages positive trends developed after 2005, in women over 50 - during the first part of decade.
Mortality decline in all age groups was due to external causes. In young and middle ages general positive dynamics was intensified by reduction of deaths in circulatory and respiratory diseases. But mortality from infections and digestive diseases retards positive processes.
Considering essential share of marginal deaths in external causes (alcohol poisonings, homicides, drawnings, falls etc.) it is possible to assume that their reduction reflects gradual negotiation of population marginalization, growth of living standards, decrease of poverty scale. But growth of mortality from infections and digestive diseases evidences that marginalization factor is not overcome. The form of its manifestation changes: in 1990s marginal population increased mortality risk from external causes, nowadays their mortality switches to somatic causes.

The aim of this paper is to investigate more deeply the role of smoking for sex differences in life expectancy in comparison to other non-biological factors. Based on the findings of previous studies we expect that populations differ mainly with respect to the time location inside the smoking epidemic model and the absolute number of years smoking contributes to the sex gap. To test these hypotheses we decompose the sex differences between 1955 and 2009 into fractions caused by biological factors (estimated on the basis of differences in life expectancy between female and male Catholic order members), smoking, and other non-biological factors for 53 industrialized countries. We find that smoking can indeed be seen as the main driver of the trend in sex differences in life expectancy for most populations, giving further support to the importance of the smoking epidemic model. However, our results reveal that the common view that smoking is also responsible for most of the sex difference itself does not hold in general. There are almost as many populations with a higher contribution of other non-biological factors as populations in which smoking is the main factor behind the sex gap.

Reducing neonatal mortality is a particularly important issue in Bangladesh. We employ a competing risks model incorporating both observed and unobserved heterogeneity and allowing the heterogeneity terms for various causes to be correlated. Data come from the Health and Demographic Surveillance System (HDSS), Matlab.
Results confirm the general conclusion on levels, trends and patterns of causes of neonatal deaths in the existing literature, but also reveal some remarkable socioeconomic differences in the risks of cause-specific deaths. A remarkable finding is gender inequality in deaths particularly due to CDs in the icddr,b area which is about 70% higher for a boy than for a girl and this difference is aabout 11 deaths per 1,000 live births over the neonatal period.
Deaths due to low birth weight and other causes (sudden infant death, unspecified or specified) are better explained from the socio- economic covariates than deaths due to neonatal infections or obstetric complications.
The analysis highlights the role of maternal and child health interventions (particularly tetanus toxoid immunization for pregnant women, nutrition programs, and high coverage health services: distance to nearest health centre). Policies that increase quality and equity in child births may help to further reduce neonatal mortality.

Objective: This study aims to shed light on prevalence of underweight and overweight and its variations by socioeconomic factors in Thai Nguyen province of Vietnam.
Method: A total of 2695 respondents were successfully completed the questionnaire. Both WHO cut-off points for Asian and Pacific (AP) and international classification for Body mass index were used. Statistical analysis was performed using Stata software with the svy procedure.
Results: The prevalence of underweight is 20.1%, it is slightly but not significantly higher in females (21.2%) than males (18.9%). The prevalence of overweight in international and AP standards are 5.2% and 15.5% respectively. Again, no significant difference between males and females is found. There are no significant differences by ethnicity. People in middle aged have lowest risk of underweight and older people have greater risk of overweight than other. Higher income is associated with higher risk of overweight and lower income is associated with underweight. But this result is only significant in highest income group.
Conclusion: People of middle age, living in city or town are at lower risk of underweight. Whereas, people who is older and richest has greater risk of overweight.
Key words: underweight, overweight, Thai Nguyen, Vietnam

This study examined gender differences in the influence of marital status and marital quality on life satisfaction. The roles of intergenerational support and perceived socioeconomic status in the relationship between marriage and life satisfaction were also explored. The analysis was conducted with data from the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) in 2006, representing 1,317 women and 1,152 men at least 25 years old. Chi-squared tests and logistic regression models were used in this process. Marriage, including marital status and relationship quality, has a protective function for life satisfaction. Marital status is more important for males, but marital quality is more important for females. The moderating roles of intergenerational support and perceived socioeconomic status are gender specific, perhaps due to norms that ascribe different roles to men and women in marriage.

Introduction: Aim of this study is to identify how socio-demographic factors contribute to the mortality differences among men and women in Sweden.
Methods: We used data from the Linnaeus Database in 2005. We analyzed using multivariate logistic regression to estimate the adjusted effects of each socio-demographic factor on mortality among men and women. Later we used a variant of the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition technique partition to measure mortality differences among men and women.
Results:Mortality rates ratio among women and men was 1.03. The difference mean of mortality rate among men and women was 0.004156. Approximately 23% of the inequality was attributed to the difference in “explained” component and 77% due to “unexplained” component. Of the “explained” components, 86% of the contribution came from education, whilst number of sibling and country of birth contributed less. The remaining 19% of the “explained” inequality was attributed to differences in the distribution of age among men and women. Of the “unexplained” component, education and number of siblings made negative contributions. Country of birth made small but statistically significant contributions.
Conclusion: This study confirmed how differences in socio-demographic and economic characteristics explained the mortality differences by gender in Sweden.