Housing Satisfaction Related to Health and Importance of Services in Urban Slums: Evidence from Dhaka, Bangladesh

Quality of housing plays one of the key roles in a public health research, since inadequate housing may have direct or indirect negative impact on health. Higher satisfaction with housing was shown to be associated with higher income, higher age, a smaller family, higher education, being female and being an owner of a dwelling. The aim of our study is to identify the multiple sources of the satisfaction with housing in population of urban slums and rural areas in Dhaka, Bangladesh. We have used a combined variable “Housing Satisfaction”, containing nine items related to satisfaction with different types of housing facilities (water, electricity, toilet etc.). Ordinal as well as binary multiple logistic regression models were applied to predict housing satisfaction. Rural residents (with 90 % house ownership) were much more satisfied with their housing than urban slum dwellers. Those respondents who perceived their area as “Very bad/Bad” to reach medical care reported significantly higher levels of housing dissatisfaction. Low satisfaction with available facilities (education, health services, etc.) as well as the adjacent neighbourhood being perceived as negative for own health showed as well a strong predictive effect on housing dissatisfaction. The major findings of our study showed a complex relationship between housing satisfaction and the quality of basic facilities including the reachability of medical care. Understanding the factors which lead to satisfaction with housing and residential environment is crucial for planning successful and effective housing policies.     

跨文化流动与健康——基于CLDS数据的实证研究

一个人的流动经历与其健康状况密切相关,这种关系不仅与迁移的地理距离有关,也与迁出地和迁入地的文化差异有关。跨文化迁移一般是通过心理压力、生活方式、收入水平和社会网络等途径对移民健康产生影响。本文选取方言、饮食和观念距离作为文化距离的代理变量,使用2014年CLDS数据分析跨文化迁移对乡城流动人口健康状况的影响及其影响机制。描述性统计分析表明乡城流动人口对于流动的文化距离具有选择性,他们大多在同一方言区和饮食圈内部进行流动,流入地和流出地的观念距离也较近。基于Probit回归结果发现方言和观念距离对乡城流动人口健康状况有显著负面影响,收入水平和社会网络在其中起着中介作用,但饮食距离对乡城流动人口健康状况的影响不显著。本文为克服可能存在的内生性问题构建了PSM模型,同时使用地形距离这一客观变量作为工具变量,这两种方法得到的结果与上述结论基本一致。使用"诊断需住院"和"身体疼痛"两个客观指标进行稳健性检验后,基本结论依然成立,具有稳健性。此外,方言和观念距离对乡城流动人口健康状况的影响存在异质性,流动持续年份、性别、流动次数、本地方言技能是导致该异质性的重要因素。     

迁移与减贫--来自农户调查的经验证据

文章主要分析劳动力流动与缓解贫困的关系。迁移从总体上改善了贫困地区的贫困程度。通过非参数分析,作者发现贫困家庭和富裕家庭的家庭特征差异对于迁移决策越发重要。而且,禀赋不足的贫困家庭即便有迁移行为发生,其在劳动力市场上的表现也与其他人有所不同。结合对工资方程的分析,作者发现改善贫困家庭的人力资本水平不仅有助于贫困家庭利用迁移,也有助于贫困家庭在劳动力市场上获得更好的收益。     

The Impact of Migration Flows on Well-Being of Elderly Natives and Migrants: Evidence from the Survey of Health,Ageing and Retirement in Europe

Social Indicators Research - Immigration has been a long-standing contentious issue across the globe. According to a recent report published by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in...     

Social Capital and Health in China: Evidence from the Chinese General Social Survey 2010

Social Indicators Research - Empirical evidence regarding the relationship between social capital and health in China is relatively limited. This study aims to examine the impact of different types...     

Differences in Health Outcomes Between Millennials and Generation X in the USA: Evidence from the National Health Interview Survey

Population Research and Policy Review - Millennials (born 1981–1996) are the largest portion of the US workforce, but very little research has examined and compared their health behaviors and...     

省际人口迁移中的老年人口

本文利用１９９５年北京市１％人口抽样调查的数据，在描述省际迁入或流入北京市的老年人口的人口学特征，并与北京市非迁移老年人口进行比较的基础上，应用Ｌｏｇｉｓｔｉｃ回归，从家庭户层次对有老年人迁入的家庭户的部分特征对老年人迁入的影响进行了分析。     

Fertility Behaviour and Wealth Situation in Nigeria: Evidence from 2013 Demographic and Health Survey

With the growing interest in evaluation of quality of life, emerging number of methods are presented. Each contribution varies depending on the matter of interest, and all of them address the issue of subjective weighting factors. The objective of this paper is to explore possibilities to enhance Better Life ranking methodology, available from the Better Life initiative website, using I-distance method. The result was twofold: firstly, we pointed out potential shortcomings of subjectively chosen weights of Better Life ranking methodology by employing our I-distance approach. Secondly, we provided detailed information on how each Better Life indicator contributes to the final position and emphasize the essential indicators in the process of ranking. We have collected the latest available data for 2014, including all 24 indicators of the Better Life composite index. After that we have compared the two ways of rankings, i.e. the I-distance ranking and the Better Life ranking, emphasizing the improvement offered by the I-distance methodology. Further, through iterative exclusion of indicators based on the level of their significance, we have reached the highest quality of the model. That model includes the following six indicators: personal earnings, water quality, life satisfaction, household net adjusted disposable income, employment rate, rooms per person. Hereby, we have compared and presented ranking changes at each iteration for the top 10 countries, which offer a level of consistency in their rank. In addition, one of the objectives is to help policymakers focus on the key indicators in order to improve the ranking of the country, showing governments and administrations which indicators are the most important to invest into. Moreover, our approach could be the foundation for impartial framework of the quality of life’s assessment, independent of subjectively formed weighting factors.     

Childbearing and Women's Survival: New Evidence from Rural Bangladesh

Effects of childbearing on women's mortality and the implications of family planning programs in reducing these effects are examined in a 20‐year prospective study of more than 2,000 women in Matlab, Bangladesh. Maternal mortality is defined as a death occurring in the six weeks after childbirth. But childbearing may affect women's survival beyond this brief period. Additional hypotheses considered relate to 1) cumulative exposure to childbearing, whether measured by parity or pace of childbearing, 2) age at first birth, and 3) effects beyond the reproductive ages. The results offer no support to cumulative exposure hypotheses, showing no link between parity or pace of childbearing and mortality risk. Instead, we identify an extended period of heightened mortality risk associated with each birth—the year of the birth and the two subsequent years. Family planning programs, by reducing the number of children and therefore a woman's exposure to extended maternal mortality risk, potentially increase survival. Research is needed to identify and address the specific causes of extended maternal mortality risk so that appropriate ameliorative programs may be developed.     

The Links between Migration,Poverty and Health: Evidence from Khayelitsha and Mitchell’s Plain

In the mid-1950s, the City of Cape Town was part of a wider area demarcated as a Coloured Labour Preference Area. The free movement of African people into the city was strictly controlled and the residential areas were segregated along racial lines. In terms of Apartheid’s grand design, an area designated Mitchell’s Plain was demarcated for occupation by Coloured people in 1973 while another designated Khayelitsha was allocated for African people in 1984. The two areas were incorporated in one magisterial district, Mitchell’s Plain, in the mid-1980s. A sample survey of the area was conducted in late November and early December 2000 with a focus on labour market issues. Its aim was to capture occupants of households aged 18 or older. The survey data has been interrogated to describe the connections between migration, poverty and health in a city where recent rapid urbanisation is changing the demographic profile significantly. As a consequence, the need to provide adequate infrastructure, decent housing and employment poses a daunting challenge ten years after the new democracy has been ushered in.This paper is an abridged version of a Centre for Social Science Research working paper No. 73 published in August 2004.     

我国城乡医疗服务利用的不平等研究——一项于CHARLS数据的实证分析

本文在机会平等的理论框架下讨论我国城乡医疗服务利用的不平等问题,以"资源"和"能力"两个维度界定不平等,并使用Oaxaca-Blinder分解模型进行分析。研究发现,城乡居民的"能力"差异可解释绝大部分的医疗服务利用差异,医疗资源可及性、医疗保险政策和教育水平也是导致差异的重要影响因素。城乡居民存在着严重的医疗服务利用不平等,农村居民处于不利地位。     

Revisiting the Effect of Income on Health in Europe: Evidence from the 8th Round of the European Social Survey

Social Indicators Research - This study provides new evidence about the effects of income on population health. To do so, our first research question controls for the absolute income hypothesis:...     

Food Access and Shocks in Rural Households: Evidence from Bangladesh and Ethiopia

As remarked by Ravallion (J Dev Econ 99:201–209, 2012), the recent switch from arithmetic to geometric mean in the aggregation of the United Nations’ Human Development Index has caused a more severe inequality penalization of the index for less developed countries, with outlying consequences. We clarify and explain this fact and propose an aggregation function, the Trichotomy Mean, that depends on two parameters: one regulates the overall penalization of disequilibria (among or within dimensions) in analogy with Atkinson’s inequality aversion parameter for power means; the other modulates the Level Dependence of the Adjustment, a novel concept describing the behavior—decreasing, increasing, or constant—of penalization of given disequilibria for increasing index level. Unlike the geometric mean (which, incidentally, has decreasing LDA type), the TM remains valid for zero or negative—and does not distort for small positive—values of the input variables, thus permitting less restrictive raw-variable normalizations and to overcome the need for exogenous lower bounds. We compare the three versions of TM with the geometric mean in an empirical analysis on the HDI 2014 data. We finally illustrate the contributions of the TM to the development literature debate.     

The South African fertility decline: Evidence from two censuses and a Demographic and Health Survey

Inadequate data and apartheid policies have meant that, until recently, most demographers have not had the opportunity to investigate the level of, and trend in, the fertility of South African women. The 1996 South Africa Census and the 1998 Demographic and Health Survey provide the first widely available and nationally representative demographic data on South Africa since 1970. Using these data, this paper describes the South African fertility decline from 1955 to 1996. Having identified and adjusted for several errors in the 1996 Census data, the paper argues that total fertility at that time was 3.2 children per woman nationally, and 3.5 children per woman for African South Africans. These levels are lower than in any other sub-Saharan African country. We show also that fertility in South Africa has been falling since the 1960s. Thus, fertility transition predates the establishment of a family planning programme in the country in 1974.     

International Migration and the Education of Children: Evidence from Lima,Peru

The issue of whether emigration has consequences for the education of children who remain behind in the country of origin occupies an increasingly prominent place in the agendas of both scholars and policy makers. The conventional wisdom is that the emigration of family members may benefit children by relaxing budget constraints through remittances that can be used to cover educational expenses. However, the empirical evidence on the overall effect of migration is inconclusive. This is due in part to a substantive emphasis on remittances in the literature, as well as the inability of some studies to deal satisfactorily with the endogeneity of household migration decisions in comparing outcomes across migrant and non-migrant households. Using Peruvian data from the Latin American Migration Project (LAMP), we apply an innovative instrumental variable technique to evaluate the overall effect of migration on educational attainment and schooling disruption among the children of immigrants. In contrast to conventional wisdom, our results suggest that a higher household risk of immigration has deleterious consequences for the education of children who remain behind.     

Youth Migration Decisions in Sub-Saharan Africa: Satellite-Based Empirical Evidence from Nigeria

This article examines the implications of urban growth on youth migration decisions in Nigeria. We use night light intensity data combined with Living Standards Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture data, as an indicator of urban growth and associated economic opportunities. Employing alternative econometric approaches that exploit the spatial and temporal differences in urban growth as proxied by night light intensity, we find that urban growth in potential migrant destinations encourages youth migration. We also find heterogeneous responses to urban growth among various groups of youth as well as varying responses to different types of migration. Broadly, women and those youth with more education are more likely to migrate, while those in households with livestock are less likely to migrate. Often, however, the effects are complex and varied. For example, land and physical asset ownership encourage temporary migration; but greater land ownership discourages permanent migration, while physical assets have insignificant effects. Our results from Nigeria show that policy makers concerned about rural–urban youth exodus should adopt a differentiated, in terms of targets, and multidimensional policy approach to reap the benefits of urbanization while avoiding its negative consequences.     

Life Satisfaction in Australia: Evidence from Ten Years of the HILDA Survey

Employing data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, this paper examines the level, determinants and distribution of self-reported life satisfaction, as well as the prevalence and severity of dissatisfaction in Australia over the period 2001–2010. Against most objective measures Australia’s economic performance during this period was exemplary. Yet our results indicate a steady decline in life satisfaction from 2003 onwards, as well as a diminishing gap between the life satisfaction of males and females. Results also suggest that inequality in life satisfaction has generally declined. Geographic heterogeneity in the distribution of life satisfaction is apparent, and a number of socio-economic and demographic factors are found to serve an important role in determining an individual’s level of life satisfaction. Measures of the extent of dissatisfaction reveal an encouraging downward trend and provide policy makers with an alternative perspective from which to assess societal welfare.     

Health Interventions and Health Equity: The Example of Measles Vaccination in Bangladesh

Although the existence of socioeconomic differentials in infant and childhood mortality in developing countries is well established. little consensus exists as to the most effective approaches to reducing such differentials. This article utilizes longitudinal data from the Matlab study area in rural Bangladesh to investigate the impact of an efficacious child survival intervention—measles vaccination—on reductions in gender and socioeconomic differentials in childhood mortality. The article analyzes data from 16,270 vaccinated children and randomly matched controls, and evaluates their subsequent mortality risks. Proportional hazards analysis demonstrates that unvaccinated children from very poor families face more than a threefold higher risk of subsequent early child mortality, compared to vaccinated children from families of high economic status. While measles vaccination has little impact on mortality risks among children of higher economic status, the improvement in survival among children from poorer households is pronounced. The provision of measles vaccination markedly reduces mortality risks for poorer children—from over three times higher to just over 1.5 times higher relative to vaccinated children from wealthier families. The findings of this study are evaluated in terms of the potential of child survival interventions such as measles vaccination to promote greater health equity.     

Impact of Relaxing the Hukou Constraints on Return Migration Intentions: Evidence from China

Population Research and Policy Review - How does the change of migration policy or institutional context in receiving places influence return migration? This paper examined the impact of relaxing...