Do marriages forget their past? Marital stability in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia

This paper assesses the impact of three main destabilizing factors on marital stability in Cambodia: the radical reformation of marriage under the Khmers Rouges (KR); the imbalanced gender ratio among marriageable adults resulting from gendered mortality during the KR regime; and, after decades of isolation from the West, a period of rapid social change. Although there is evidence of declining marital stability in the most recent period, marriages contracted under the KR appear as stable as adjacent marriage cohorts. Thesefindings suggest that the conditions under which spouses were initially paired matter less for marital stability than does their contemporaneous environment.     

It Takes a Village (Perhaps a Nation): Families,States, and Educational Achievement

Research in the United States has shown that children growing up in 2‐parent households do better in school than children from single‐parent households. We used the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) data to test whether this finding applied to other countries as well (N = 100,307). We found that it did, but that the educational gap was greater in the United States than in the other 13 countries considered. Results from 2‐level hierarchical linear models demonstrated that international differences in the educational gap were associated with several indicators of national policy and demographic contexts. No single policy appeared to have a large effect, but several policy combinations were associated with substantially reduced educational gaps between children from different family structures.     

The International Child Poverty Gap: Does Demography Matter?

According to the Luxembourg Income Study data, the U.S. child poverty rate is the second highest among 15 high-income nations. The present work reveals that 55% of all American children living in a household headed by a single female with no other adult present live in poverty-the highest rate for any of the five living arrangements in the 15 countries examined in this study. While previous analyses have focused on market forces and governmental redistribution across households, we question the contribution of demographic factors that place children in family structures with different poverty risks relative to other factors such as differential market opportunities and governmental benefits for adults caring for children in various living arrangements. Applying a classic demographic decomposition technique to the overall poverty gap, we find that the distributional effect of demographic behavior contributes little to the U.S. poverty gap with other nations (and none with respect to the United Kingdom). Overall differences in labor markets and welfare schemes best explain the U.S. child poverty gap, although for some countries, the gap is accentuated by the gradient of governmental transfers, and for most countries, by the gradient of market earnings across living arrangements.     

The role of cohabitation in family formation: The United States in comparative perspective

The prevalence of nonmarital cohabitation is steadily increasing in the United States. In evaluating the contribution of this new living arrangement to family formation, analysts have relied primarily on comparisons between individuals who cohabit and those who do not. We complement this line of inquiry by comparing the United States and 16 industrialized nations. We first identify six conceptually distinct ideal types of cohabitation with respect to family formation. We then propose empirical indicators to distinguish between the different ideal types, and estimate the values of these indicators for each of the 17 nations. Our findings indicate that although a number of countries fit an empirical pattern corresponding to one ideal type, cohabitation in the United States is more difficult to characterize.     

The global and regional impact of mortality and fertility transitions, 1950-2000

During the second half of the twentieth century, world population grew at a record pace, both in absolute and relative terms, from 2.5 billion to 6 billion (or 1.75 percent annually). Demographers have long identified rapid mortality declines as the main explanation. This article finds that one-fourth of today's world population is alive because of mortality improvements since mid-century. Very rapid growth is unlikely to continue as substantial fertility declines also occurred in recent decades. This article finds that already by the year 2000, these fertility declines have almost exactly compensated for the impact of mortality declines from mid-century levels. This result may suggest homeostasis, but analyses of underlying trends contradict this impression. First, the impact of fertility declines will soon and significantly exceed that of mortality declines. Second, that mortality and fertility declines jointly affect the size of the world population by less than one percent conceals a significant impact on the population's age composition as well as on regional population sizes.     

HIV and population dynamics: A general model and maximum-likelihood standards for East Africa

In high-prevalence populations, the HIV epidemic undermines the validity of past empirical models and related demographic techniques. A parsimonious model of HIV and population dynamics is presented here and fit to 46,000 observations, gathered from 11 East African populations. The fitted model simulates HIV and population dynamics with standard demographic inputs and only two additional parameters for the onset and scale of the epidemic. The underestimation of the general prevalence of HIV in samples of pregnant women and the fertility impact of HIV are examples of the dynamic interactions that demographic models must reproduce and are shown here to increase over time even with constant prevalence levels. As a result, the impact of HIV on population growth appears to have been underestimated by current population projections that ignore this dynamic.     

Shifting Childrearing to Single Mothers: Results from 17 Western Countries

We investigate how recent changes in the Western family have affected childhood living arrangements. For 17 developed countries, we use multistate life table techniques to estimate childhood trajectories of coresi‐dence with biological fathers versus other maternal partners. In all countries childhood exposure to single parenting is more often caused by parental separation than out‐of‐partnership childbearing. Both exposure to single parenting and expectancy of childhood spent with a single non‐cohabiting mother vary widely across countries, with the United States exhibiting the highest levels of each at early 1990s rates. The greatest international variations concern parental cohabitation—its prevalence, durability, and the degree to which its increase has compensated for a decrease in the expectancy of childhood spent with married parents. Overall, we find little evidence of international convergence in childrearing arrangements, except that in countries where parental marriage has declined over time, childrearing has predominantly shifted to single mothers.     

Aids and population growth in sub-Saharan Africa: Assessing the sensitivity of projections

Despite different models to project the course of the AIDS pandemic and a scarcity of data to provide standard input parameters for those models, a limited consensus emerges from distinct sets of population projections. In sub-Saharan Africa, population growth rates are projected to remain positive in spite of the pandemic over the next few decades. To investigate this conclusion, alternative projections of an HIV/AIDS epidemic and its related mortality are first produced from different sets of input parameters and assumptions. Their incorporation into the population projections of a fast-growing country illustrates the robustness of projected population growth rates under very different scenarios of the future epidemic but with the common assumption that it will not affect the mortality of the uninfected population, fertility nor migration. This paper then shows that the projected growth rates are much less robust when interactions between the epidemic and the demographic regime are allowed and identifies several potential mechanisms for such interactions. In particular, it suggests that improving our confidence in the medium-term projections of the demographic impact of AIDS in the region requires less a refinement of the projections of the epidemic than a better understanding of its impact on the timing of the postulated fertility decline.     

The boundaries of genocide: Quantifying the uncertainty of the death toll during the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia (1975–79)

The range of estimates of excess deaths under Pol Pot's rule of Cambodia (1975–79) is too wide to be useful: they range from under 1 to over 3 million, with the more plausible estimates still varying from 1 to 2 million. By stochastically reconstructing population dynamics in Cambodia from extant historical and demographic data, we produced interpretable distributions of the death toll and other demographic indicators. The resulting 95?per cent simulation interval (1.2–2.8 million excess deaths) demonstrates substantial uncertainty over the exact scale of mortality, yet it still excludes nearly half of the previous death-toll estimates. The 1.5–2.25 million interval contains 69 per cent of the simulations for the actual number of excess deaths, more than the wider (1–2 million) range of previous plausible estimates. The median value of 1.9 million excess deaths represents 21?per cent of the population at risk.

Supplementary material for this article is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2015.1045546     

'Between one and three million': towards the demographic reconstruction of a decade of Cambodian history (1970-79)

Estimates of mortality in Camabodia during the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-79) range from 20,000 deaths according to former Khmer Rouge sources, to over three million victims according to Vietnamese government sources. This paper uses an unusual data source - the 1992 electoral lists registered by the United Nations - to estimate the population size after the Khmer Rouge regime and the extent of "excess" mortality in the 1970s. These data also provide the first breakdown of population by single year of age, which allows analysis of the age structure of "excess" mortality and inference of the relative importance of violence as a cause of death in that period. The estimates derived here are more comparable with the higher estimates made in the past. In addition, the analysis of likely causes of death that could have generated the age pattern of "excess" mortality clearly shows a larger contribution of direct or violent mortality than has been previously recognized.