Average life expectancy of the population of the USSR

Mortality trends in the USSR from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present day are analyzed, with a focus on changes in life expectancy. The authors note that life expectancy increased up to 1964-1965, declined subsequently, and stabilized during the 1980s. Life expectancy has again started to rise since 1985. More detailed analyses of mortality differentials by sex and age and for the rural and urban populations are included. (SUMMARY IN ENG)     

Recent Mortality Trend Reversal in Russia: Are Regions Following the Same Tempo?

After several decades of negative trends and short-term fluctuations, life expectancy has been increasing in Russia since 2004. Between 2003 and 2014, the length of life rose by 6.6 years among males and by 4.6 years among females. While positive trends in life expectancy are observed in all regions of Russia, these trends are unfolding differently in different regions. First, regions entered the phase of life expectancy growth at different points in time. Second, the age- and cause-specific components of the gains in life expectancy and the number of years added vary noticeably. In this paper, we apply decomposition techniques—specifically, the stepwise replacement algorithm—to examine the age- and cause-specific components of the changes in inter-regional disparities during the current period of health improvement. The absolute inter-regional disparities in length of life, measured by the population-weighted standard deviation, decreased slightly between 2003 and 2014, from 3.3 to 3.2 years for males, and from 2.0 to 1.8 years for females. The decomposition of these small changes by ages and causes of death shows that these shifts were the result of diverse effects of mortality convergence at young and middle ages, and of mortality divergence at older ages. With respect to causes of death, the convergence is mainly attributable to external causes, while the inter-regional divergence of trends is largely determined by cardiovascular diseases. The two major cities, Moscow and Saint Petersburg, are currently pioneering mortality improvements in Russia and are making the largest contributions to the inter-regional divergence.     

The Cultural Preferences of Today's Russian College Students

Cultural interests of young Russians are changing, interest in science and mathematics is less than it was for earlier generations, and universities in Russia are having to provide an education that is more compensatory as well as more elementary than was the case a few years ago.     

Acute Middle Ear Infection in Small Children: A Bayesian Analysis Using Multiple Time Scales

The study is based on a sample of 965 children living in Oulu region (Finland), who were monitored for acute middle ear infections from birth to the age of two years. We introduce a nonparametrically defined intensity model for ear infections, which involves both fixed and time dependent covariates, such as calendar time, current age, length of breast-feeding time until present, or current type of day care. Unmeasured heterogeneity, which manifests itself in frequent infections in some children and rare in others and which cannot be explained in terms of the known covariates, is modelled by using individual frailty parameters. A Bayesian approach is proposed to solve the inferential problem. The numerical work is carried out by Monte Carlo integration (Metropolis-Hastings algorithm).     

Computational Examples of a New Method for Distribution Selection in the Pearson System

A considerable problem in statistics and risk management is finding distributions that capture the complex behaviour exhibited by financial data. The importance of higher order moments in decision making has been well recognized and there is increasing interest in modelling with distributions that are able to account for these effects. The Pearson system can be used to model a wide scale of distributions with various skewness and kurtosis. This paper provides computational examples of a new easily implemented method for selecting probability density functions from the Pearson family of distributions. We apply this method to daily, monthly, and annual series using a range of data from commodity markets to macroeconomic variables.     

Losses of Expected Lifetime in the United States and Other Developed Countries: Methods and Empirical Analyses

Patterns of diversity in age at death are examined using e ^†, a dispersion measure that equals the average expected lifetime lost at death. We apply two methods for decomposing differences in e ^†. The first method estimates the contributions of average levels of mortality and mortality age structures. The second (and newly developed) method returns components produced by differences between age- and cause-specific mortality rates. The United States is close to England and Wales in mean life expectancy but has higher life expectancy losses and lacks mortality compression. The difference is determined by mortality age structures, whereas the role of mortality levels is minor. This is related to excess mortality at ages under 65 from various causes in the United States. Regression on 17 country-series suggests that e ^† correlates with income inequality across countries but not across time. This result can be attributed to dissimilarity between the age- and cause-of-death structures of temporal mortality reduction and intercountry mortality variation. It also suggests that factors affecting overall mortality decrease differ from those responsible for excess lifetime losses in the United States compared with other countries. The latter can be related to weaknesses of health system and other factors resulting in premature death from heart diseases, amenable causes, accidents and violence.     

The Recent Mortality Decline in Russia: Beginning of the Cardiovascular Revolution?

The health situation in Russia has often been characterized as a long‐running crisis. From the 1960s until the beginning of the 2000s, the declining life expectancy trend was substantially interrupted only twice: once in the mid‐1980s as a result of Gorbachev's anti‐alcohol campaign, and again at the end of the 1990s as a result of the “rebound” effect following the dramatic rise in mortality associated with the acute socioeconomic crisis. In both cases, the progress made proved to be short‐lived. A third mortality decline in Russia began in 2003 and is still ongoing. We investigate the components and driving forces of this new development, in particular the role played by cardiovascular diseases. Using cause‐specific mortality data, we identify the main features of the recent improvements and compare these features with those observed in selected European countries, specifically France, Poland, and Estonia. Our aim is to gauge whether the features of the improvements in these countries are similar to those of the recent advancements made in Russia. Although the recent improvements in Russia have features in common with initial stages of prior mortality declines in other countries and may support optimism about the future, a return to mortality stagnation cannot be ruled out.     

An assessment of population losses during World War II

An attempt is made to estimate losses to the population of the USSR due to World War II by projecting the probable population in 1945 based on prewar population data and comparing the projections to the actual population in 1945. The authors calculate that the country lost between 26 and 27 million people, of which some 19 million were male. These losses include direct deaths due to the fighting, indirect mortality due to wartime conditions, and losses through emigration.