Exploring Thailand's mortality transition with the aid of life tables

The project Thai Health-Risk Transition: A National Cohort Study seeks to better understand the health implications of modernisation and globalisation forces impacting on Thailand. As part of its ‘look-back’ component this paper seeks, using available life tables, to document the country's post-war mortality transition. The onset of transition through mass campaigns of the late 1940s and 1950s is first discussed before attention turns to the life tables. They are predictably far from flawless, but careful analysis does permit trends that have seen around 30 years added to life expectancy to be traced, and age patterns of improved survivorship and their relation to initiatives to improve health to be examined. The broad benefits generated by mass campaigns, ongoing improvements in infant and early childhood mortality, and a phased impact of the expansion of primary health care in rural areas on adult survival prospects after the mid-1970s are demonstrated. The paper also investigates the consequences for mortality of a motorcycle-focused rapid increase in road fatalities in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the HIV/AIDS epidemic that developed after 1984

ECONOMIC EQUALITY AND VICTORY IN WAR: AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION

This paper tests a simple hypothesis: that given the occurrence of war between two countries, the country that is more egalitarian at the moment of military decision is likely to emerge the victor. First, we examine cases where comparative economic inequality can be measured directly, using the nearly comprehensive global datasets of the University of Texas Inequality Project for the years 1963-1999. Second, we examine cases where reasonable inferences about comparative economic inequality may be drawn by analogy to UTIP measurements or from other political and economic evidence, including both bi-national wars and larger wars where there existed clear pair-wise fronts. Third, we discuss selected cases where inferences may be drawn from literary or historical sources. We find, all in all, that the evidence for an egalitarian victory proposition is remarkably strong.