Malnourished and surviving in South Asia, better nourished and dying young in Africa: What can explain this puzzle?

This paper examines the factors explaining the very different relationship between anthropometric shortfall and child mortality in South Asia and Sub Saharan Africa. While in the former, very high rates of anthropometric shortfall coexist with comparatively lower child mortality rates, rates of anthropometric shortfall in Sub Saharan Africa are much lower, yet under five mortality is much higher than in South Asia. This puzzle is examined using a panel data set of undernutrition, mortality, and their correlates. The analysis suggests that the unusually high rates of anthropometric shortfall in South Asia are partially due to the use of a US¡based reference standard which appears to generate misleading international comparisons of undernutrition. The very high rates of under five mortality in Africa seem to be mostly due to very high fertility, high and rising HIV prevalence, and a possible multiplicative interaction of risk factors

Surviving Unemployment without State Support: Unemployment and Household Formation in South Africa

High unemployment in many OECD countries is often attributed, at least in part, to the generosity and long duration of unemployment compensation. It is therefore instructive to examine a country where high unemployment exists despite the near complete absence of an unemployment insurance system. In South Africa unemployment stood at 23% in 1997 and the unemployed have no unemployment insurance nor informal sector activities to fall back on. This paper examines how the unemployed are able to get access to resources without support from unemployment compensation. Analysing a household survey from 1995, we find that the household formation response of the unemployed is the critical way in which they assure access to resources. In particular, unemployment delays the setting up of an individual household of young people, in some cases by decades. It also leads to the dissolution of existing households and a return of constituent members to parents and other relatives and friends. Access to state transfers (in particular, non¡ contributory old age pensions) increases the likelihood of attracting unemployed persons to a household. Some unemployed do not benefit from this safety net, and the presence of unemployed members pulls many households supporting them into poverty. We also show that the household formation responses draw some unemployed away from employment opportunities and thus lowers their employment prospects. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for debates about unemployment and social policy in South Africa and in OECD countries

The Nutritional Status of Elites in India, Kenya, and Zambia: An appropriate guide for developing reference standards for undernutrition?

Assessments of undernutrition are typically based on comparisons between anthropometric indicators of children and a reference standard from the US. Due to a number of problems associated with this reference standard, WHO is currently engaged in generating a new international reference standard for child growth based on well­to­do populations in a sample of poor and rich countries. The focus on socioeconomic elites is to ensure that the measured growth reflects their genetic potential (and not according their constrained environment). Based on an analysis of the Demographic and Health Surveys from Kenya, India, and Zambia, we identify a number of problems associated with using socioeconomic elites as representative of the genetic potential of a population. First, there are several, non­overlapping ways to identify elites. Second, the anthropometric status of elites appears to depend to a considerable degree on the nutrition and health status of non­elites. Third, there is a danger that the elites are not a random sample of the growth potential of the population. And lastly, it appears that the nutritional status of elites differs substantially between the three countries so that it is unclear how one can combine them to generate one international reference standard

Analysis of the Determinants of Fertility Decline in the Czech Republic

In this paper we study the decline in total fertility rates in the Czech Republic during the transition process. To identify transition-specific features of this decline we use a multiperiod model of birth process and apply it to the family and fertility survey of 1998. In a standard duration analysis setting the model allows for time-dependence of information sets, on which the decision about the next birth is made. It also enables to estimate probabilities of early exit from childbearing. In this work we find that the negative effect of transition on TFR is mostly translated through a sharply increased negative influence of higher education on fertility, and through the apparent lack of adequate childcare facilities

Suppression factors in diffractive photoproduction of dijets

After new publications of H1 data for the diffractive photoproduction of dijets, which overlap with the earlier published H1 data and the recently published data of the ZEUS collaboration, have appeared, we have recalculated the cross sections for this process in next-to-leading order (NLO) of perturbative QCD to see whether they can be interpreted consistently. The results of these calculations are compared to the data of both collaborations. We find that the NLO cross sections disagree with the data, showing that factorization breaking occurs at that order. If direct and resolved contributions are both suppressed by the same amount, the global suppression factor depends on the transverse-energy cut. However, by suppressing only the resolved contribution, also reasonably good agreement with all the data is found with a suppression factor independent of the transverse-energy cut.Comment: 28 pages, 11 figures, 3 table

Dijet photoproduction of massless charm jets at next-to-leading order of QCD

We compute the charm dijet photoproduction cross section at next-to-leading order of QCD in the zero-mass variable flavour number scheme, i.e. with active charm quarks in the proton and photon. The results are compared to recent measurements from the ZEUS experiment at HERA. The predictions for various distributions agree well with the data, in particular for large momentum fractions of the the partons in the photon, where direct photon processes dominate. At low momentum fractions, the predictions are quite sensitive to the charm content in the photon. The experimental data are shown to favour parameterizations with a substantial charm quark density such as the one proposed by Cornet et al.Comment: 18 pages, 11 figure

Dynamic Modelling of Child Mortality in Developing Countries: Application for Zambia

In this paper, we analyse the causes of under five mortality in Zambia, with a particular emphasis on assessing possible time-variations in the effects of covariates, i.e. whether the effects of certain covariates vary with the age of the child. The analysis is based on micro data from the 1992 Demographic and health Survey. Employing a Bayesian dynamic logit model for discrete time survival data and Markov-Chain Monte Carlo methods, we find that there are several variables, including the age of the mother and the breastfeeding duration whose effects exhibit distinct age-dependencies. In the case of breastfeeding, this age dependency is intimately linked with the reasons for stopping breastfeeding. Incorporating such age dependencies greatly improves the explanatory power of the model and yields new insights on the differential role of covariates on child survival

Semiparametric Analysis of the Socio-Demographic and Spatial Determinants of Undernutrition in Two African Countries

We estimate semiparametric regression models of chronic undernutrition (stunting) using the 1992 Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) from Tanzania and Zambia. We focus particularly on the influence of the child's age, the mother's body mass index, and spatial influences on chronic undernutrition. Conventional parametric regression models are not flexible enough to cope with possibly nonlinear effects of the continuous covariates and cannot flexibly model spatial influences. We present a Bayesian semiparametric analysis of the effects of these two covariates on chronic undernutrition. Moreover, we investigate spatial determinants of undernutrition in these two countries. Compared to previous work with a simple fixed effects approach for the influence of provinces, we model small scale district specific effects using flexible spatial priors. Inference is fully Bayesian and uses recent Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques