April 01, 2015 | News | Süßmilch Lecture

Six outstanding problems in developing country demography

On April 14, 2015, demographer and statistician Griffith Feeney will give a lecture at the MPIDR. He will address problems demographers face when investigating demographic issues in developing countries.

About the talk
Interest in developing country demography intensified during the 1960s, but studying population trends required civil registration data on births and deaths. Because most developing countries did not have civil registration systems producing usable data, indirect methods were developed and pressed into service.

From the late 1960s through the early 1980s, these methods were an active and fruitful area of academic research. The methods developed were applied throughout the world, and in combination with the development of survey methods, they provided knowledge of population trends that could not have been obtained in any other way.

But indirect methods were always an expedient. They are intrinsically limited. The idea was always that developing countries would develop civil registration systems comparable to those in developed countries.

Unfortunately, this has not happened. Most developing countries have not developed systems that produce usable demographic data. Indirect methods therefore continue to be used long after they should have been retired, and long after academic interest in their development and application waned.

The talk addresses six current problems in developing country demography. Three of the problems are demographic: errors in population age distribution, the estimation of mortality from population census data, and the estimation of fertility from population census data. The other three problems are institutional. They concern civil registration, population census reports, and data on international migration.

About the Presenter
Griffith Feeney is a demographer and applied statistician. His first published paper appeared in Demography in 1970 when he was a graduate student in the Department of Demography at the University of California at Berkeley. On completing graduate work, he went to the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, where he spent the next 26 years alternating between research, practical work in national statistical offices throughout Asia, and teaching graduate students and mid-career professionals. He has a distinguished record of contributions to demographic analysis in peer-reviewed journals. Since 1998, he has been an independent consultant in demography and statistics working mainly in developing countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Time and Venue
Tuesday, April 14, 2015, 4 p.m. in the Institute´s Auditorium