'Three decades of assistance from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has helped the Government of Egypt dramatically reduce deaths among pregnant women and infants. Compared with the 1970s, today 50 percent fewer women are dying during pregnancy, and 70 percent fewer infants are dying in the first year of life.'

"Intra- and inter-generational social mobility have in the past played an important role in attempts to explain fertility behaviour, and continue to do so today. The opinions expressed by social scientists in the first part of the 20th century are renewed and confirmed. More specifically: (1) intra-generational social mobility has been reinforced by the personal well-being aspirations and job careers of women; (2) status anxiety parents feel for their children pushes fertility down in large area more...

"The Generations and Gender Survey (GGS) is one of the two pillars of the Generations and Gender Programme designed to improve understanding of demographic and social development and of the factors that influence these developments. This article describes how the theoretical perspectives applied in the survey, the survey design and the questionnaire are related to this objective. The key features of the survey include panel design, multidisciplinarity, comparability, context-sensitivity, inter-g more...

"Forecasting the population of Poland is very challenging. Firstly, the country has been undergoing rapid demographic changes. In the 1990s, they were influenced by the political, economic, and social consequences of the collapse of the communist regime. Since 2004 they have been shaped by Poland’s entry into the European Union. Secondly, the availability of statistics for Poland on past trends is strongly limited. The resulting high uncertainty of future trends should be dealt with systematic more...

"Gender differences in mortality and life expectancy vary by country. But in most countries, men live shorter lives than women. In Russia, for instance, the difference between male and female life expectancy is 13 years (59 vs. 72). In other countries, such as the United States, the male disadvantage is smaller: 5 years (75 vs. 80). And in some countries, such as Afghanistan, there is little or no male disadvantage (42 vs. 42)..." (By Sandra Yin, Population Reference Bureau (PRB), November 2007 more...

Demographic surveillance systems (DSS) depend on community acceptance and involvement to produce high quality longitudinal data. Ensuring community support also exposes power relations usually concealed in the research process. In this article, the authors discuss the Agincourt Health and Demographic Surveillance System in South Africa to argue that: 1) long-term presence and community involvement contribute to high response rates and data quality, 2) to maintain community support the project mu more...

Results from assessments conducted by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Indian Institute of Health Management Research show substantial improvements in the health status of the people of Afghanistan after decades of conflict. From 2004 to 2006, the health system has shown improvement for many key measures in a majority of provinces. Additionally, household surveys implemented by researchers from Johns Hopkins and the Indian Institute of Health Managemen more...

Over the past decade, Africa has recorded an average growth rate of 5.4 percent. It appears to have learned to trade more effectively with the rest of the world, to rely more on the private sector, and to avoid the very serious collapses in economic growth that characterized the 1970s, 1980s and even the early 1990s. Increasing oil prices have helped Africa's seven biggest oil economies, which are home to 27.7 percent of the continent's population. Rising prices of precious metals and other comm more...

"A variety of approaches have been employed to assess the importance of women’s education for their second- or third-birth rates. Some researchers have included the educational level measured at a relatively high age in their models, whereas others have included current education. A few have taken selection into account by modelling first-, second-, and higher-order birth rates jointly, with a common unobserved factor. The corresponding education-fertility relationships among men, however, has more...

A high educational attainment is shown to have a positive effect on second birth rates for Danish one-child mothers during the period 1981-94. In this article, the authors examine whether a time-squeeze is a possible explanation: due to the longer enrolment in the educational system, highly educated women have less time at their disposal in order to get the desired number of children. The authors also examine the extent to which the partner's education can explain some of the positive effect. Th more...