English  Français

Adult mortality by education level in Brazil: comparative findings from Census and Vital Registration Deaths

Cassio M. Turra, Demography Department, Cedeplar, UFMG
Mirian Ribeiro, Universidade Federal dos Vales do Jequitinhonha e Mucuri
Fernando Fernandes, Independent Consultant & Researcher

Brazil is a country marked by high inequality levels. Regrettably, there is still no high-quality data for correctly measuring socioeconomic differences in adult mortality at the individual level. Research on this topic is at least 50 years late in Brazil than in the U.S. and European countries. We try to fill some of the literature gaps by providing new comparative estimates of adult mortality by education using two different methodological approaches: i) data on deaths from the 2010 demographic census with the education level of the deceased members imputed by statistical methods, and ii) data on deaths by education level from death records, extracted from the Mortality Information System (SIM). For the statistical imputation of census data, we use the Dempester (1977) method, which proposes using the expectation-maximization algorithm (EM algorithm) to deal with missing data. We consider three education levels (low, medium, and high) and estimate mortality rates based on Poisson models. Preliminary results based on the 2010 census data for Brazilian Southeast Region suggest that between ages 25 and 59, more years of schooling are associated with mortality rates up to 43% lower. Medium education level provides most of the mortality gains at adult ages.

Keywords: Mortality, Comparative methods, Inequality, Census data

See extended abstract.

  Presented in Session 174. Socioeconomic Status and Mortality