Forced Migration and Mortality (2001) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
Pages 102-129
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 102... ...
102 5 The Demographic Analysis of Mortality Crises: The Case of Cambodia, 1970-1979 Patrick Heuveline As best as can now be estimated, over two million Cambodians died during the 1970s because of the political events of the decade, the vast majority of them during the mere four years of the "Khmer Rouge" regime. This number of deaths is even more staggering when related to the size of the Cambodian population, then less than eight million.
|
From page 103... ...
PATRICK HEUVELINE 103 CAMBODIA IN THE 1970s1 At the onset of this terrible decade in Cambodian history, the Communist Party of Kampuchea's (CPK) armed opposition to prince Norodom Sihanouk was gaining momentum.
|
From page 104... ...
104 DEMOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF MORTALITY IN CAMBODIA the death toll for the four years in the order of 300,000 or less (Banister and Johnson, 1993:87-90; Sliwinski, 1995:48)
|
From page 105... ...
PATRICK HEUVELINE 105 estimates of its toll are around 500,000 deaths (Ea, 1987; Banister and Johnson, 1993; Sliwinski, 1995) but those are again contested as much too high (Kiernan, 1986)
|
From page 106... ...
106 DEMOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF MORTALITY IN CAMBODIA what was left of the ethnic Vietnamese population in 1975 (about 200,000 people) , this was not the most likely destination as civilians were pushed westward by the moving military front.
|
From page 107... ...
PATRICK HEUVELINE 107 plete count of deaths in countries without complete vital registration but accurate periodical censuses. In practice, this approach has not proved most reliable.
|
From page 108... ...
108 DEMOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF MORTALITY IN CAMBODIA sample with desirable statistical properties. Often, the survey takers will be restricted to a few areas of easier access or worse, if the country is still inaccessible, to the refugee population.
|
From page 109... ...
PATRICK HEUVELINE 109 Two Population Estimates When there are no registration or retrospective data on deaths, mortality can be estimated indirectly from relationships between different demographic variables. Most of these so-called indirect estimation techniques cannot be used in the analysis of mortality crisis because the estimation of one variable from another one relies on some empirical regularity in the relationship between the two variables across populations.
|
From page 110... ...
110 DEMOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF MORTALITY IN CAMBODIA life-table survival ratio, as suggested by Coale and Demeny (United Nations, 1983)
|
From page 111... ...
PATRICK HEUVELINE 111 age group, these techniques are exactly equivalent to those based on changes in cohort size.4 Whether the cohort or age-group approach is chosen, these techniques only estimate the mortality of those born at the beginning of the period, and the corresponding life table starts at age n, where n is the length of the crisis period. To obtain mortality estimates from birth requires data on birth during the period.
|
From page 112... ...
112 DEMOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF MORTALITY IN CAMBODIA used by adjusting nPx-n(t)
|
From page 113... ...
PATRICK HEUVELINE 113 typical sex, age, and cause-of-death patterns of normal mortality and I concentrate here on changes in these patterns during mortality crises. (For a discussion of the ethnic and regional mortality patterns during the Cambodian crisis, see Kiernan, 1996.)
|
From page 114... ...
114 DEMOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF MORTALITY IN CAMBODIA age patterns of mortality and the methods built thereon should still be applicable. Model life tables based on data from medium-to-low mortality populations do not seem to provide a very good extrapolation of mortality patterns under higher mortality conditions (Bhat, 1987)
|
From page 115... ...
PATRICK HEUVELINE 115 crisis. Mortality age patterns thus reflect the prevalence of different causes of death in the population (Preston, 1976)
|
From page 116... ...
116 DEMOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF MORTALITY IN CAMBODIA by Hill (1987) , who also discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches.
|
From page 117... ...
PATRICK HEUVELINE 117 experienced no violent mortality at all and the decomposition pushes natural mortality to its lowest possible level. Even though these two possible biases would partially compensate one another, the decomposition is only indicative of the relative share of the two mortality types.
|
From page 118... ...
118 DEMOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF MORTALITY IN CAMBODIA census data on excess mortality, questions were included in an early 1980s administrative census. They resulted in an estimate of 3.3 million deaths, a tally inflated by multiple counts, the number of which could never be fully accounted for, as the records were not computerized and name matching almost impossible.
|
From page 119... ...
PATRICK HEUVELINE 119 were still unsafe, the authors must have limited themselves geographically. In spite of their efforts to stratify their estimates by reaching different segments of the population, the representativeness of their sample is difficult to assess.
|
From page 120... ...
120 DEMOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF MORTALITY IN CAMBODIA authors at the time) , the extent of the fertility decline can only be assessed with a fairly high level of uncertainty because the mortality conditions the 1975-1979 birth cohorts faced until the 1998 census date are not precisely known either.
|
From page 121... ...
PATRICK HEUVELINE 121 many different projections with different demographic parameters, whose outcomes mapped the range of possible estimates of excess deaths. The possibility to obtain not only a central or best estimate in the analyst's judgment, but also a sense of the uncertainty involved in the reconstruction, is a comparative advantage of the indirect approach.
|
From page 122... ...
122 T A B L E 5 -1 P op u la ti on , 1 97 0 an d 1 98 0 an d R es id u al P op u la ti on D ef ic it in t he 1 97 080 In te rv al , b y A ge a nd S ex ( in T ho u sa nd s)
|
From page 123... ...
PATRICK HEUVELINE 123 even though those would be easier to estimate yearly. Finally, the emigration of people who did not return to Cambodia by 1993 is mostly captured in the immigration statistics of receiving countries (about 250,000 after 1980)
|
From page 124... ...
124 DEMOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF MORTALITY IN CAMBODIA 1970-1975 civil war, while a similar number might also be reasonable for the impact of the famine, although the range of estimates for the latter is quite wide. Finally, the excess mortality of those born after 1970 (not included in Table 5-1)
|
From page 125... ...
PATRICK HEUVELINE 125 Figure 5-4, together with the pattern of residual mortality. The decomposition yields plausible results, including a residual number of violent deaths of 1.1 million deaths for the 1975-1979 period.
|
From page 126... ...
126 DEMOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF MORTALITY IN CAMBODIA estimate. In the end, it is rather from the limited convergence of some of these independent attempts that a sense of confidence might be gained.
|
From page 127... ...
PATRICK HEUVELINE 127 volume. Preston et al.
|
From page 128... ...
128 DEMOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF MORTALITY IN CAMBODIA Ea, M.T. 1981 Kampuchea: A country adrift.
|
From page 129... ...
PATRICK HEUVELINE 129 National Institute of Statistics 1996 Demographic Survey of Cambodia: General Report. Phnom Penh, Cambodia: United Nations Population Fund for the National Institute of Statistics, Ministry of Planning.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.