Bayesian reconstruction of two-sex populations by age: estimating sex ratios at birth and sex ratios of mortality

Mark C. Wheldon, Adrian E. Raftery, Samuel J. Clark and Patrick Gerland

Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, 2015, vol. 178, issue 4, 977-1007

Abstract: type="main" xml:id="rssa12104-abs-0001">

The original version of Bayesian reconstruction, which is a method for estimating age-specific fertility, mortality, migration and population counts of the recent past with uncertainty, produced estimates for female-only populations. Here we show how two-sex populations can be similarly reconstructed and probabilistic estimates of various sex ratio quantities obtained. We demonstrate the method by reconstructing the populations of India from 1971 to 2001, Thailand from 1960 to 2000 and Laos from 1985 to 2005. We found evidence that, in India, the sex ratio at birth exceeded its conventional upper limit of 1.06, and, further, increased over the period of study, with posterior probability above 0.9. In addition, almost uniquely, we found evidence that life expectancy at birth, e 0 , was lower for females than for males in India (posterior probability for 1971–1976 equal to 0.79), although there was strong evidence for a reversal of the gap through to 2001. In both Thailand and Laos, we found strong evidence for the more usual result that e 0 was greater for females and, in Thailand, that the difference increased over the period of study.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/rssa.2015.178.issue-4 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jorssa:v:178:y:2015:i:4:p:977-1007

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://ordering.onli ... 1111/(ISSN)1467-985X

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A is currently edited by A. Chevalier and L. Sharples

More articles in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A from Royal Statistical Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().