Palloni A, Rafalimanana H
Center for Demography and Ecology, University of Wisconsin, Madison 53706-1393, USA.
Demography. 1999 Feb;36(1):41-58.
In this paper, we examine empirical evidence for a relation between infant and child mortality and fertility in Latin American countries from 1920 to 1990. We investigate the relation at several levels of aggregation and evaluate the extent to which evidence at one level is consistent with evidence at other levels. We first examine aggregate cross-country information over several decades, a type of data typically used in past research on the topic. We also examine yearly series of births, deaths, infant deaths, and socioeconomic indicators for selected countries to track the association between short-term fluctuations in fertility and infant mortality. Finally, we use micro-level data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) to assess the relation between fertility and child mortality from individual reproductive histories. The evidence we assemble from these different data sets is remarkably consistent and suggests small positive effects of infant mortality on fertility. These effects, however, may be too small to support the hypothesis that changes in child mortality are of more than modest importance in the process of fertility decline in Latin America in the late twentieth century.
在本文中，我们考察了1920年至1990年拉丁美洲国家婴儿及儿童死亡率与生育率之间关系的实证证据。我们在多个汇总层面研究这种关系，并评估一个层面的证据与其他层面证据的一致程度。我们首先考察了几十年间的跨国总体信息，这是该主题以往研究中常用的一类数据。我们还考察了部分选定国家的年度出生、死亡、婴儿死亡及社会经济指标序列，以追踪生育率短期波动与婴儿死亡率之间的关联。最后，我们使用人口与健康调查（DHS）的微观层面数据，从个体生育史来评估生育率与儿童死亡率之间的关系。我们从这些不同数据集收集到的证据非常一致，并表明婴儿死亡率对生育率有微小的正向影响。然而，这些影响可能太小，不足以支持儿童死亡率变化在20世纪后期拉丁美洲生育率下降过程中具有重大意义这一假设。
