Applying demographic analysis in affirmative action disputes: An instructional case

This instructional case study illustrates applications of demographic concepts, data, and techniques in evaluating affirmative action goals for equalizing employment opportunity. Courts of law addressing employment discrimination disputes need an accurate picture of each minority group's proportion in a pool of prospective employees. The demographic and socioeconomic factors conditioning those proportions vary from place to place. In the situation examined here, the court originally used an imperfect population standard to set hiring goals. The case traces the multiple failures to account for those conditioning influences and describes the resulting distortions of legal purpose. In analyzing this failure, students gain experience in clarifying issues in dispute, devising measures to fit legal standards, and delineating qualified labor pools. Specific instructional applications include: using census data to document how local population structure and composition determine each minority group's presence in the workforce; and using administrative data to delineate the relevant labor pools for setting affirmative action goals. Training is broadly suited to assignments where applied demographers must delineate the ethnic and racial composition of a pool of workers eligible to be hired or promoted.     

Changing educational inequalities in india in the context of affirmative action

Indian society suffers from substantial inequalities in education, employment, and income based on caste and ethnicity. Compensatory or positive discrimination policies reserve 15% of the seats in institutions of higher education and state and central government jobs for people of the lowest caste, the Scheduled Caste; 7.5% of the seats are reserved for the Scheduled Tribe. These programs have been strengthened by improved enforcement and increased funding in the 1990s. This positive discrimination has also generated popular backlash and on-the-ground sabotage of the programs. This paper examines the changes in educational attainment between various social groups for a period of nearly 20 years to see whether educational inequalities have declined over time. We use data from a large national sample survey of over 100,000 households for each of the four survey years--1983, 1987-1988, 1993-1994, and 1999-2000--and focus on the educational attainment of children and young adults aged 6-29. Our results show a declining gap between dalits, adivasis, and others in the odds of completing primary school. Such improvement is not seen for Muslims, a minority group that does not benefit from affirmative action. We find little improvement in inequality at the college level. Further, we do not find evidence that upper-income groups, the so-called creamy layer of dalits and adivasis, disproportionately benefit from the affirmative action programs at the expense of their lower-income counterparts.     

The development and use of demographic models

In this review, we first examine two classical demographic models - conventional life tables and stable populations - and a modern generalization of stable population theory; we then discuss mathematical models of conception and birth. These models involve purely mathematical relations in formal demography as opposed to empirical regularities. Next we consider model age schedules of mortality, nuptialitiy, marital fertility, fertility, and migration that are explicitly based on such empirical patterns. We close this empirical section with a discussion of model stable populations, which are based on model life tables. We next examine the use of demographic models in forecasting future mortality, nuptiality, and fertility and in population projection. Following a discussion of microsimulation models, which gives us the opportunity to mention model age schedules of post partum amenorrhoea and of sterility, we close with observations about the purposes and uses of demographic models.     

The exponential multidimensional demographic projection model

"This paper presents the multidimensional demographic projection on the basis of an exponential specification, which avoids the problems associated with the widely used specification on the basis of the linear integration hypothesis. It generalizes earlier work by Gill (1986) on Markov models for closed populations to include the case of open populations. A numerical illustration is also provided." (SUMMARY IN FRE)     

The exponential multidimensional demographic projection model

This paper presents the multidimensional demographic projection on the basis of an exponential specification, which avoids the problems associated with the widely used specification on the basis of the linear integration hypothesis. It generalizes earlier work by Gill (1986) on Markov models for closed populations to include the case of open populations. A numerical illustration is also provided.     

The analysis of linkages in demographic theory

Many seemingly different questions that arise in the analysis of population change can be phrased as the same technical question: How, within a given demographic model, would variable y change if the age- or time-specific function f were to change arbitrarily in shape and intensity? At present demography lacks the machinery to answer this question in analytical and general form. This paper suggests a method based on modern functional calculus for deriving closed-form expressions for the sensitivity of demographic variables to changes in input functions or schedules. It uses this “linkage method” to obtain closed-form expressions for the response of the intrinsic growth rate, birth rate, and age composition of a stable population to arbitrary marginal changes in its age patterns of fertility and mortality. It uses it also to obtain expressions for the transient response of the age composition of a nonstable population to time-varying changes in the birth sequence, and to age-specific fertility and mortality patterns that change over time. The problem of “bias” in period vital rates is also looked at.     

The demographic effects of a contraceptive programme

Abstract The calculation of the number of births prevented for each item of contraceptive service provided entails the integration of a variety of factors relating to the potential fertility of users and the duration and effectiveness of use. This article differs from previous essays of this kind in that estimates of future potential fertility are based not on fertility rates but on age-specific means of inter-live birth intervals, modified by periods of use overlapping post-partum sterility, and by the probabilities attached to the development of permanent sterility and to the successful adoption of extra-programme birth control. In the first three years after acceptance of intra-uterine contraception by some 9,000 postpartum women of several ethnic origins in Singapore, it is calculated that about 4,800 births were prevented.     

The cocos-keeling islands: A demographic laboratory

The Cocos Islands, which are situated in the Indian Ocean approximately halfway between Colombo and Fremantle, were first peopled early in the nineteenth century and were gradually developed as a very isolated coconut plantation with a labour force consisting partly of persons of Malay stock descended from the original group of settlers and partly of Bantamese contract labourers from Java. As the Cocos-born population increased in size, the dependence on contract labour decreased and, before the end of the century, all immigration ceased. The 1947 Malay population of the islands was about 1,800.

The islands are fascinating from a demographer's point of view because there was a virtually complete registration of live births, deaths and marriages and a partial registration of stillbirths. With these registration records it was possible to construct the life history of every individual from birth, through infancy and childhood to marriage, and thence through fatherhood or motherhood to death.

The picture revealed by an analysis of these records is that of a population with very high fertility and with mortality at a high level before the first World war and at a medium level after that war. Crude birth rates varied between 50 and 60 per thousand population during the period 1888 to 1947. Crude death rates were between 30 and 40 per thousand population until 1912 but under 2.0 per thousand population after 1918.

Most Cocos girls married before reaching the age of 20 and there were an average of between eight and nine live births per woman living through the childbearing period. There was a steady decline in the average number of live births with advancing age at marriage from age 16 onwards. A significantly high proportion of those dying in the middle of the childbearing period had never married, but the fertility of those marrying at an early age (14, 15 and 16) and dying before reaching the age of 36 was slightly higher than that of those who married at a similar age and survived. Women who survived to the age of 55 were of higher fertility than those who died between the ages of 40 and 55. An analysis of birth intervals revealed significant differences (a) between birth intervals after a stillbirth or after a live birth in which the child died in early infancy, and birth intervals after a live birth in which the offspring survived for longer than 0.4 years, and (b) between the interval from first to second birth and the subsequent birth intervals. There was a difference of almost exactly a year between the average birth interval after a stillbirth or live birth ending in a neo-natal death and the average birth interval after the birth of a child surviving to age 2; there was a similar difference of a year between corresponding median birth intervals.

From 1888 to 1912 infant mortality was well above 300 per thousand. After 1918 infant mortality averaged rather under 100 infant deaths per 1,000 live births. The reduction in infant mortality rates was accompanied by an increase in the mortality of children aged 1 to 4, and the heavy incidence of mortality at these ages after 1918 is the most striking feature of the analysis of mortality by age. Whilst mortality in infancy fell much more heavily on males than on females, early childhood mortality was much higher in Cocos for girls than for boys. The life table computed for the period 1918 to 1947 indicated a life expectancy of about 50 years for males and 47 years for females.     

The pattern of birth spacing during Taiwan's demographic transition

This paper considers the impact of an extended family structure on the fertility behavior of married women in Taiwan. A sequential duration model is applied to identify the differences in fertility behavior during the early and latter stages of a woman's reproductive period. Heterogeneity adjustments which correct the respondent-specific characteristics are also implemented. It is found that living with the husband's parents has an impact on the wife's fertility only at the early stage of her childbearing period, and that the subjective son preferences together with the objective fact of no son in the previous 2 births do force a wife to expedite her third birth. These results are robust across different cohorts during the demographic transition and under different specifications of hazard functions. We thank an anonymous referee for his or her valuable comments and suggestions. Responsible editor: Junsen Zhang.     

The North Korean famine and its demographic impact

The North Korean famine began in 1995 and its ill effects, while peaking in the late 1990s,undoubtedly linger. Recent conjectures on excess deaths caused by the famine range widely from about 200,000 to 3 million or more. This article assesses the demographic impact of the famine with greater rigor than has previously been attempted and describes the unique setting in which the famine occurred. The analysis begins with a pair of population projections based on mortality statistics from two sources. Given their contradictory implications, the analysis turns to less direct evidence of famine‐related mortality. That evidence includes China's demographic experience during the Great Leap Forward and recent measurements of child malnutrition in North Korea. Crosscountry comparisons translate this malnutrition into corresponding levels of infant mortality. The article concludes that famine‐related deaths in North Korea from 1995 to 2000 most likely numbered between 600,000 and 1 million.