Spatial Patterns and Determinants of Demographic Outcomes

Malaria remains one of the world's most devastating public health threats. In Peru, 75% of malaria occurs in the northern Amazon region of Loreto where 80% of cases are concentrated in just 10 districts. Loreto is the least densely populated region of Peru and also the largest. To maintain the declining malaria rates currently seen, better knowledge of where, when and why people are infected is needed. The primary factors affecting malaria endemicity in Loreto are vector habitat expansion from land use change, and social and ecological processes that increase human exposure. To refine and focus prevention strategies, spatially explicit risk estimates are necessary. In this study, we investigate how malaria risk varies across time and space in Loreto by modeling the relationship among climate, land use, and malaria from 2009 to 2012. We incorporate satellite-derived climate and land use variables with data on monthly malaria counts at each government health post in Loreto. Initial models indicate increased malaria risk for lagged rainfall and soil moisture as well as land areas prone to flood. These models will be compared against current forecasting methods to determine if more efficient prevention and control efforts can be implemented.

In the Egyptian context, delayed fertility transition compared to neighboring countries, can be in part ascribed to the delay in the fall of infant mortality rates. Infant mortality was high in Egypt till the 1980s. Since then, infant mortality recorded significant progress: in 2001, the number of deaths per 1000 births was 38 against 97 in 1984. However differences are still significant between governorates: in urban governorates, the 2008 level is 29 deaths per 1,000 births. In rural Upper Egypt, mortality was about 39 ‰. No previous studies had attempted to estimate infant and child mortality in Egypt for small geographical areas. Strong socio-economics differences and inequalities exist between urban and rural setting, Upper and Lower Egypt and even between small area in the same region or city. Those differences justify the need to calculate infant and child mortality rates at the local level. We will account for this problem using a Bayesian hierarchical model for small area: model-based estimators will be derived and their precisions compared with alternative estimators proposed in literature. We use data from Egyptian Demographic and Health Surveys (1995 and 2005), Egyptian population register and Egyptian Population and Housing Census (1996 and 2006).

This study examines spatial patterns in infant and under-five mortality rates at the levels of agro-climatic zones and Census-districts in India. We find significant spatial correlation both at the national and local level indicating that both global and local environment influences the mortality rates. We identify Assam-East as a spatial outlier. Besides, there exist several hot- and cold-spots in the country. The study further examines determinants of under-five mortality using spatial regression models. Contrary to the existing evidence, we find neither female labor force participation nor general level of modernization help reducing under-five mortality significantly. However, our findings indicated that reducing poverty, improving provisioning of public health interventions like antenatal care to women and immunization of children, and educating women significantly reduce the mortality rates. Integrating health awareness with health policy might be helpful in improving health outcomes. Using OLS without adjusting for spatial heterogeneity may lead to biased and inefficient parameter estimates.

Urbanization has greatly altered the distribution of world’s cities. While the number of cities has been mushrooming from all corners of the world, the greatest number of cities and the largest cities today are increasingly found in the developing world. We use the 2011 Revision of the World Urbanization Prospects to compute population centroids of world’s cities from 1950 to 2025. We find that the world centroid has had a southeastward trajectory after 1950. The surface distance of the centroid in 2010 was 2150 km away from that in 1950. Asia has the greatest impact on the evolution of the population centroid of world cities than other major areas. Only the US (in the whole study period) and China (after 1990) ever altered this trajectory. The trajectory of population centroid of world cities is in line with that of their geographic centroid, whereas it differs from that of their economic centroid. Trajectories of the demographic centroids for major areas and countries are also discussed. The changes of population centroids will definitely have important socioeconomic and environmental consequences at local, regional or global levels.

Population projections at a small area level are sensitive to random departures in temporal trends of population change components. In order to have robust trends for the county level projections in Costa Rica, the team in charge of forecasting decided to determine county clusters based on the past trends. In this paper, we compare three descriptive techniques used to build space-time clusters for the Crude Birth Rate: Functional Data Analysis (FDA), the scan statistic, and Geographically Weighted Regression GWR. GWR was the technique that yielded clusters related to the diffusion paradigm for fertility decline. However, the scan statistic provided a more parsimonious set of clusters that are more tractable for population projections.

This paper presents the map unmarried cohabitation in the Americas. The map offers a large scale cross-national perspective together with small area estimates of cohabitation. Census microdata from 41 countries and more than 17,000 units have been pulled together to map the percentage of cohabitation among women in union aged 25 to 29. From Canada to Argentina, results show inter- and intra-national contrasting regional patterns. The highest rates of cohabitation are found in areas of Central America, the Caribbean, Colombia and Peru. The lowest rates are mainly found in the United States and Mexico. Brazil, Argentina and Chile occupy intermediate positions. In all countries, there is substantial spatial heterogeneity, as indicated by spatial autocorrelation statistics. Our results beg the question as to which forces have shaped these patterns and remind us that such forces need to be taken into account to understand recent patterns and rises in cohabitation.

Demographic phenomena show spatial regularity and specific patterns which need to be studied. Development of GIS and Geodatabase brought maps common, and recent developments of spatial analysis allow going further than mapping to measure spatial structure. Neighborhood and scale are two dimensions of demographic data which can’t be no longer ignored.

This paper proposes an original exploration of spatial dimensions of demographic variables (density, proportion of 65+in the population, proportion growth) through the systematic analysis of French census data at various scales (6 administrative divisions) and times (6 censuses from 1968 to 2007).

Using moran’s I and LISA, we consider the effects of scales and neighborhood on spatial patterns. The results underline the necessity to better take space into account in statistical analysis.

Maternal morbidity and mortality is worse in Bangladesh because of low usage of maternal healthcare. An attempt, based on Andersen’s health seeking behavior model and Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey-2007 data, has been made to investigate maternal healthcare utilization by ever married women in Bangladesh. For showing geographic variation and pattern of maternal healthcare utilization across districts several maps have been made by using GIS. For finding significant determinants of maternal healthcare utilization, four dependent variables (antenatal care, place of delivery, assistance during delivery and postnatal care) were considered; and logistic regression models were estimated for those four dependent variables. Results reveal that education level, household wealth index and place of residence are significant determinant for raising utilization of all four types of maternal healthcare. In addition, age at childbirth has statistically significant impact on antenatal care. For bringing up utilization of maternal healthcare, some long term interventions, such as providing education to girls, should be emphasized. Also, short term intervention as community education for married women, about symptoms of complications during pregnancy and at delivery, about importance of treatment should be implemented. For raising mat

In the four past decades, demographic researchers noticed the emergence of a type of cities defined as medium-sized cities, playing an important role in the regional imbalance in the Brazilian urban universe. Using the data taken from IBGE (2010), this study finds that the country counts 245 medium-sized cities with populations ranking from 100.000 to 500.000 inhabitants, which are experiencing a remarkable demographic performance by showing larger population growth rates than the country as a whole. In fact, this kind of demographic size entitles such cities to fill up the position of regional poles, functioning as a leading base for balanced economic growth and territorial organization of activities, providing good accessibility to services of general economic interest, as an integrated system connected to stronger metropolitan areas. This paper aims at a twofold objective. First, it analyses the demographic growth and social dynamics in medium-sized cities, presenting a brief review on the literature which explores the features of the urban poverty in the Brazilian context. Second, it approaches the subject of inequalities and spatial poverty distribution, using a demographic methodology and data from the National Population Census of 2010, in an attempt to better understanding both processes.

The measurement of spatial segregation phenomena has been mainly studied in the United States since the 1950’s. A multitude of segregation indexes have been elaborated to analyze all the aspects of this topic. In 1988, Massey and Denton synthetized the scientific knowledge by a 5-dimensional classification: evenness, exposure, concentration, centralization and clustering. This presentation displays us to demonstrate that these dimensions can be approached by a single index: the Duncan’s segregation index (1955). By using a method of spatial decomposition of the index, the proposed methodology allows to free itself from the aspatial character of the index and to create a map representation which visually reproduces the spatial structure of the phenomenon. Applied to the French urban areas this methodology allows demonstrating that the spatial structure of segregation is organized according to a sectorial model (Hoyt) for socioeconomic criteria, and follows a concentric model (Burgess) for sociodemographic criteria.