Re-reading the history of divorces in terms of territories (France, 1884-1913)

This paper proposes a re-reading of the history of divorces from the re-establishment of divorce in France in 1884 until the eve of the First World War, by distinguishing three major territories: the urban population, the rural population and the Department of the Seine. To refine the analysis, we will add data distinguishing Paris from its suburbs, within the Seine Department. The interest of the analysis, beyond measuring the level of divorces in these territories, is to answer the question of the homogenisation of divorce behaviour between 1884 and 1913. The available sources also provide details on divorces, which are generally unavailable outside the national level, such as which spouse obtained the divorce, the reason for the divorce, the length of the marriage, the age and age difference between the two spouses, and the number of children of divorced couples. In addition to measuring the levels of divorces in these territories, the aim will therefore be to find out whether the characteristics of divorces are the same in the urban and rural populations and in the Seine Department and, if not, to try to understand why they diverge.

Différences d’espérance de vie sans incapacité dans les départements français

Les espérances de vie sans incapacité ainsi que leurs déterminants individuels ont fait l'objet de nombreux travaux, en France comme dans l'ensemble des pays à faible mortalité. En revanche, à l’échelle infra-nationale les études sont très rares, faute d’enquête mesurant les niveaux d’incapacité représentative à cet échelon. Pourtant, à l'instar des écarts infra-nationaux de mortalité déjà démontrés, il y a tout lieu de penser que l'indicateur national d'espérance de vie sans incapacité recouvre d'importantes inégalités territoriales. En 2014, l’enquête Vie Quotidienne et Santé (VQS) offre la possibilité de calculer, pour la première fois, les niveaux d’incapacité des 60 ans et plus à partir d’un échantillon représentatif à l’échelle départementale. Nous mobilisons les données de cette enquête pour, dans un premier temps, calculer l’espérance de vie sans incapacité dans chacun des 100 départements français, puis, dans un second temps, mettre en lien cet indicateur avec les limitations fonctionnelles rencontrées par la population des 60 ans et plus. Les premiers résultats mettent en évidence de forts écarts départementaux concernant l’incapacité, selon une géographie proche de celle des écarts de mortalité. Les départements dans lesquels l’espérance de vie sans incapacité est faible se caractérisent par une forte prévalence des limitations fonctionnelles touchant les fonctions physiques.

1997-2017 : An assessment of two decades of immigration in Belgium

Résumé Aujourd’hui plus qu’hier, présenter des chiffres clairs sur l’immigration constitue une nécessité, mais également un défi. Cet article tente de démêler quelques chiffres-clés pour apporter un éclairage sur les flux récents d’immigration et d’asile en Belgique. Ces dernières années, le nombre d’entrées d’étrangers a atteint un niveau historiquement élevé. En 2017, près de 140 000 immigrations internationales ont été enregistrées. Les citoyens de l’UE représentent plus de la moitié de ces immigrations. Derrière une tendance migratoire globalement en hausse depuis la fin des années 1990, des logiques migratoires assez contrastées peuvent être dégagées. Depuis 2014 par exemple, les Français se font devancer par les Roumains dans les immigrations étrangères vers la Belgique, depuis lors en tête de classement. Depuis plus de cinquante ans l’immigration marocaine figure parmi les principaux flux d’immigration, mais cette migration ancienne est freinée récemment par un regroupement familial rendu plus difficile. Les immigrations de Syriens enregistrées en Belgique ont par contre fortement augmenté, plaçant la Syrie dans le top cinq des pays d’origine des immigrants en 2016 et 2017. Abstract Today more than yesterday, presenting clear immigration Figures is a necessity, but also a challenge. This article aims to unravel some key Figures to shed light on recent immigration and asylum flows in Belgium. In recent years, the number of entries of foreigners in Belgium has reached a historically high level. In 2017, nearly 140,000 international immigrants were registered. EU citizens accounted for more than half of these immigrants. Behind a migration trend that has been on the rise since the end of the 1990s, contrasting migratory patterns can be identified. Since 2014, for example, the French have been more numerous than Romanians among foreign immigrants to Belgium and have been at the top of the list ever since. For more than fifty years Moroccan immigration has been one of the main immigration flows, but this long‐standing migration has recently been slowed down by family reunification, which has become more difficult. Registered Syrian immigration to Belgium has risen sharply, placing Syria in the top five countries of origin of immigrants in 2016 and 2017.

Les causes de décès aux grands âges en France, évolution récente

Dans les pays les plus avancés, la mort survient de plus en plus aux grands âges. En France, par exemple, en 2016, 73 % des décès féminins se sont produits après 85 ans, alors que ce n’était le cas que de 41 % en 1975 et même seulement 25 % en 1950. Alors que le sujet paraissait jadis anecdotique, des chercheurs s’interrogent de plus en plus sur ce que peuvent être les causes de décès aux grands âges. Beaucoup, cependant, estiment que la question est relativement vaine car plus l’âge avance, plus les causes sont multiples ce qui rend d’autant plus difficile la détermination d’une cause principale tandis que de leur côté les médecins déclarants posent souvent des diagnostics flous. Il est vrai que le nombre de décès dont la cause est mal définie, voire non déclarée, augmente avec l’âge, mais il nous semble néanmoins que les certificats médicaux de cause de décès portent de plus en plus d’informations exploitables jusqu’à des âges très avancés dans beaucoup de pays, dont la France. Dans le même temps, la précision des âges au décès recueillis par la statistique de l’état civil, longtemps assez défaillante aux grands âges, s’est beaucoup améliorée au cours des dernières décennies. Nous tentons donc ici de suivre l’évolution de la mortalité française par cause et par âge au-delà de 90 ans, depuis la fin des années 1970, tant pour les hommes que pour les femmes. Non seulement, l’étude confirme que la mortalité diminue à tous les âges, y compris les plus élevés, et quel que soit le sexe. Elle nous permet aussi d’évaluer le poids de chacun des grands groupes de causes (cancers, maladies du cœur, autres maladies de l’appareil circulatoire, maladies infectieuses et respiratoires, diabète, démences et maladies neuro-dégénératives, autres maladies, accidents et sénilité), dans ce recul de la mortalité aux âges élevés et donc dans la montée des espérances de vie à 90 ans, ainsi que le rôle qu’ils jouent dans la différence d’espérance de vie entre les sexes dont l’évolution, même aux grands âges s’est récemment retournée.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo armed conflict 1998-2004: Assessing excess mortality based on factual and cournter-factual projection scenarios

To document the scale and scope of the 1998–2004 armed conflicts in the Democrat­ic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the current study combined four different data sources: the 1984 DRC Population Census, the 1995 and 2001 DRC Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys and the 2007 DRC Demographic and Health Survey, to reconstruct missing demographic estimates and assess the level of excess mortality associated with the conflict, going from 1998 to 2007. Findings from this study do not corrobo­rate previous estimates on the same armed conflict and for the same period: these range from excess mortality of 5.4 million population according to Coghlan et al. (2009), to 0.2 million according to Lambert and Lohlé-Tart (2008). The cohort component projection method as used in this study is a cost-effective approach as it allows the analysis of a complex issue, that is excess mortality associat­ed with an armed conflict, with relatively modest resources. This study highlights that the choice of baseline rates is a key factor in determining the level of excess mortality when data points are scarce. This study produced a range of plausible estimates of excess mortality between 1 and 1.9 million population rather than a single best estimate. The range of excess mortality produced in this study is narrower and less extreme when compared to previous studies on the same conflict. As a further contribution to the debate in this field, the current study advocates producing a range of plausible estimates rather than a single best estimate of excess mortality. This is justified by the uncertainties associated with the scarcity of the data, the statistical modelling and the overall analysis process.

Evidencing the gap between health expectancy and life expectancy for ethnic groups in Scotland.

Background Recent evidence has shown that ethnic minorities live longer than the majority population in Scotland. This mortality advantage in ethnic minorities is not unique to Scotland. However, whether morbidity patterns by ethnicity align with mortality patterns by ethnicity is unknown. Thus, this study explores ethnic differences in health expectancies (HE) in Scotland and contrasts HE with life expectancy (LE) findings. Methods The Scottish Health and Ethnicity Linkage study anonymously links the Scottish Census 2001 for 4.6 million people to mortality records. The Scottish Census 2001 collected two measures of self-assessed health, self-declared ethnicity, age, and sex. Utilising the life tables used to calculate life expectancy by ethnicity and sex in Scotland, the Sullivan method was employed to calculate two measures of health expectancy (healthy life expectancy and disability-free life expectancy) by ethnicity and sex. 95% confidence intervals were calculated to detect significant differences compared to the majority White Scottish population, taken as reference. Results Longer health expectancies were found in males and females of Other White British, Other White, and Chinese origins as well as in Indian males compared to White Scottish populations. Any Mixed Background and Pakistani populations had the shortest healthy life expectancies. Patterns of health expectancy by ethnicity mostly aligned with patterns of life expectancy by ethnicity with the clear exception of the Pakistani population who showed among the longest life expectancies with the shortest health expectancies. Contrasting HE with LE findings, the number of years in an unhealthy state was greater in females than in males for each ethnic group. In relation to ethnicity, Pakistani and Indian populations had the highest number of years in an unhealthy state in Scotland. Pakistani females showed the strong-est disadvantage in this respect. Conclusion Pakistani populations had the shortest health expectancies contrasting with the longest life expectancies in Scotland. Future research should aim to understand why such a discrepancy occurs while policy makers ensure that fair and adapt-ed care is provided to offer better quality of life for the most vulnerable.

Mortality in Belgium from nineteenth century to today

Résumé Cet article dresse une synthèse de l’évolution de la mortalité en Belgique du 19ème siècle à nos jours en mettant l’accent sur les inégalités socio-démographiques et spatiales. Il se base sur une revue de la littérature et exploite les données de la Human Mortality Database (HMD) pour les analyses consacrées à l’évolution de la mortalité selon l’âge et le sexe depuis le début du 19ème siècle. L’appariement des données du Registre national, des recensements de la population et des bulletins de décès de l’état-civil est mobilisé pour les analyses plus récentes (1991-2015). En Belgique, la durée moyenne de vie dépasse aujourd’hui 80 ans, soit deux fois plus qu’il y a 170 ans. Mais, comme dans d’autres pays occidentaux, des inégalités subsistent et parfois même se renforcent. Ainsi, les inégalités entre groupes sociaux face à la mort sont importantes et elles se sont accentuées depuis le début des années 1990, au moins. Ces différences sociales s’observent pour toutes les causes de décès et à tous les âges, chez les femmes comme chez les hommes. Les disparités spatiales de mortalité, à l’échelle des régions, des arrondissements et des milieux de résidence se sont également accrues depuis au moins un quart de siècle. De plus, à même groupe social, les disparités spatiales de mortalité persistent. Cela signifie que des facteurs environnementaux, culturels, comportementaux agissent de la même manière sur la mortalité pour chacun des groupes sociaux. Abstract This article offers an overview of shifts in mortality in Belgium from the nineteenth century to the present, particularly in terms of sociodemographic and spatial disparities. It analyzes these shifts in mortality according to age and sex since the early nineteenth century, drawing from a review of the literature and using data from the Human Mortality Database (HMD). For the more recent analyses (1991-2015), data from the National Register, population censuses and official death records were matched up. In Belgium, the average life expectancy is now 80 years, twice as long as 170 years ago. As in other Western countries, however, disparities persist and sometimes even widen. There are thus major inequalities between social groups in regards to death, and these have been worsening since at least the early 1990s. These inequalities are apparent for each cause of death and ages at death, for women and for men. Spatial inequalities in mortality by region, district and residential area have also widened over at least the past quarter century. Even within similar social groups there are spatial disparities in mortality, indicating that environmental, cultural and behavioural factors affect mortality in the same way for each social group.

The geometry of mortality change: Convex hulls for demographic analysis

We introduce convex hulls as a data visualization and analytic tool for demography. Convex hulls are widely used in computer science, and have been applied in fields such as ecology, but are heretofore underutilized in population studies. We briefly discuss convex hulls, then we show how they may profitably be applied to demography. We do this through three examples, drawn from the relationship between child and adult mortality (5q0 and 45q15 in life table notation). The three examples are: (i) sex differences in mortality; (ii) period and cohort differences and (iii) outlier identification. Convex hulls can be useful in robust compilation of demographic databases. Moreover, the gap/lag framework for sex differences or period/cohort differences is more complex when mortality data are arrayed by two components as opposed to a unidimensional measure such as life expectancy. Our examples show how, in certain cases, convex hulls can identify patterns in demographic data more readily than other techniques. The potential applicability of convex hulls in population studies goes beyond mortality.

«No money, no honey»? Poverty and young men’s unmarried relationships in urban Burkina Faso

In Burkina Faso, the expectation that a young man has to financially support his girlfriend is deeply rooted in gender norms and is a keystone of masculinity construction. With the persistent economic crisis, high unemployment rates, and the growing importance of materiality in intimate relationships, this economic obligation seems more and more difficult to fulfil, however. Qualitative studies have reported the frustration of unemployed and poorer young men in West African cities who face difficulties in attracting girlfriends due to their economic condition. This sexual marginalization of poorer city-dwellers, suggested by anthropological evidence, has yet to be explored quantitatively. This is the purpose of the study. Based on unique life history data collected from young adults in 2010 in the capital city of Ouagadougou, the present research examines the impact of poverty on young men’s sexual relationship histories. Although they engage in a number of premarital relationships, results suggest that young men in Ouagadougou are not equal in the search for sexual partners. The study provides support for the «sexual marginalization hypothesis» and shows that other things being equal, unemployed males and uneducated young men are significantly less likely than their better-off counterparts to engage in relationships over time

Refugees’ trajectories in Switzerland: Impact of residence permits on labour market integration

Life course trajectories of refugee populations in European countries highly depend on the various statuses and residence permits that are assigned to them. Taking the case study of Switzerland, this article aims at showing the impact of the legal framework on refugees’ chances of labour market integration. The term «refugee» here refers to all the individuals who came to Switzerland seeking asylum, no matter the outcome of the asylum procedure – and not only to those who obtained the status as defined by the 1951 Geneva Convention. In this study, the longitudinal follow‐up of the individuals is made possible by the matching of data from several population registers. From a descriptive point of view, sequence analysis allows the visualization of refugees’ trajectories from their arrival in the country – in terms of both residence permits and of labour market participation. Survival analysis models then show the concordance between the administrative status and the economic status, the access to more stable permits increasing significantly the chances of labour market integration. As a consequence, those who remain for many years with the most precarious permits (asylum seekers and provisionally admitted persons) go through a process of cumulative disadvantage. Although the economic vulnerability of refugees has been highlighted previously, this paper shows that within the refugee population, the host countries’ legislation creates an additional hierarchy, based on the residence permits, that further widens inequalities.