Hoe presteerde Nederland op de Olympische Spelen in Londen?

Nu de Olympische Zomerspelen in Londen zijn afgelopen kan de balans worden opgemaakt. Met 6 gouden, 6 zilveren en 8 bronzen medailles en een 13de plek in het medailleklassement haalde Nederland 3 medailles meer dan de doelstelling van NOC*NSF, maar niet de geambieerde klassering in de Top-10. Demograaf en econoom Peter Ekamper laat zijn licht schijnen over de vraag: Kunnen we nu wel of niet tevreden zijn met de prestaties van de Nederlandse Olympische ploeg?

Severe Prenatal shocks and adolescent health: Evidence from the Dutch Hunger Winter

JEL classification: I10; J13.Data availability: The data that has been used is confidential.Supplementary data are available online at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X24000248?via%3Dihub#appSB .This paper investigates health impacts at the end of adolescence of prenatal exposure to multiple shocks, by exploiting the unique natural experiment of the Dutch Hunger Winter. At the end of World War II, a famine occurred abruptly in the Western Netherlands (November 1944 - May 1945), pushing the previously and subsequently well-nourished Dutch population to the brink of starvation. We link high-quality military recruits data with objective health measurements for the cohorts born in the years surrounding WWII with newly digitised historical records on calories and nutrient composition of the war rations, daily temperature, and warfare deaths. Using difference-in-differences and triple differences research designs, we first show that the cohorts exposed to the Dutch Hunger Winter since early gestation have a higher Body Mass Index and an increased probability of being obese at age 18. We then find that this effect is partly moderated by warfare exposure and a reduction in energy-adjusted protein intake. Lastly, we account for selective mortality using a copula-based approach and newly-digitised data on survival rates, and find evidence of both selection and scarring effects. These results emphasise the complexity of the mechanisms at play in studying the consequences of early conditions

War-related excess mortality in The Netherlands, 1944–45: New estimates of famine- and non-famine-related deaths from national death records

Despite there being several estimates for famine-related deaths in the west of The Netherlands during the last stage of World War II, no such information exists for war-related excess mortality among the civilian population from other areas of the country. Previously unavailable data files from Statistics Netherlands allow researchers to estimate the number of war-related excess deaths during the last stage of the war in the whole country. This study uses a seasonal-adjusted mortality model combined with a difference-in-difference approach to estimate the number of excess deaths in the period between January 1944 and July 1945 at a total of close to 91,000 (75%) excess deaths. Almost half of all war-related excess mortality during the last year of the war occurred outside the west

Need for recovery from work in relation to age: a prospective cohort study

To investigate the impact of increasing age on the need for recovery (NFR) over time among day workers The study is based on data from the first 2 years of follow-up of the Maastricht Cohort Study (n = 7,734). To investigate whether age predicted the onset of elevated NFR, multivariate survival analyses were conducted The highest levels of NFR were observed in the age group of 46-55 years. The relative risk for developing elevated NFR was highest in the age groups 36-45 years (RR 1.30; 1.07-1.58) and 46-55 years (RR 1.25; 1.03-1.52) in men and 46-55 years (RR 1.36; 1.04-1.77) in women when compared to the reference group While NFR increased with age until the age of 55, this was followed by decreased levels of NFR among older employees. Explanations for the decreasing levels of NFR in the highest age group can be found in several domains such as the work environment, private situation and compensation strategies

Famine food of vegetal origin consumed in the Netherlands during World War II

Background: Periods of extreme food shortages during war force people to eat food that they normally do not consider edible. The last time that countries in Western Europe experienced severe scarcities was during World War II. The so-called Dutch famine or Hunger Winter (1944-1945) made at least 25,000 victims. The Dutch government took action by opening soup kitchens and providing information on wild plants and other famine food sources in "wartime cookbooks." The Dutch wartime diet has never been examined from an ethnobotanical perspective. Methods: We interviewed 78 elderly Dutch citizens to verify what they remembered of the consumption of vegetal and fungal famine food during World War II by them and their close surroundings. We asked whether they experienced any adverse effects from consuming famine food plants and how they knew they were edible. We identified plant species mentioned during interviews by their local Dutch names and illustrated field guides and floras. We hypothesized that people living in rural areas consumed more wild species than urban people. A Welch t test was performed to verify whether the number of wild and cultivated species differed between urban and rural citizens. Results: A total number of 38 emergency food species (14 cultivated and 21 wild plants, three wild fungi) were mentioned during interviews. Sugar beets, tulip bulbs, and potato peels were most frequently consumed. Regularly eaten wild species were common nettle, blackberry, and beechnuts. Almost one third of our interviewees explicitly described to have experienced extreme hunger during the war. People from rural areas listed significantly more wild species than urban people. The number of cultivated species consumed by both groups was similar. Negative effects were limited to sore throats and stomachache from the consumption of sugar beets and tulip bulbs. Knowledge on the edibility of famine food was obtained largely by oral transmission; few people remembered the written recipes in wartime cookbooks. Conclusion: This research shows that 71years after the Second World War, knowledge on famine food species, once crucial for people's survival, is still present in the Dutch society. The information on famine food sources supplied by several institutions was not distributed widely. For the necessary revival of famine food knowledge during the 1940s, people needed to consult a small group of elders. Presumed toxicity was a major reason given by our participants to explain why they did not collect wild plants or mushrooms during the war

An IPW estimator for mediation effects in hazard models: with an application to schooling, cognitive ability and mortality

Large differences in mortality rates across those with different levels of education are a well-established fact. Cognitive ability may be affected by education so that it becomes a mediating factor in the causal chain. In this paper, we estimate the impact of education on mortality using inverse-probability-weighted (IPW) estimators. We develop an IPW estimator to analyse the mediating effect in the context of survival models. Our estimates are based on administrative data, on men born between 1944 and 1947 who were examined for military service in the Netherlands between 1961 and 1965, linked to national death records. For these men, we distinguish four education levels and we make pairwise comparisons. The results show that levels of education have hardly any impact on the mortality rate. Using the mediation method, we only find a significant effect of education on mortality running through cognitive ability, for the lowest education group that amounts to a 15% reduction in the mortality rate. For the highest education group, we find a significant effect of education on mortality through other pathways of 12%