Amand Blanes

The health transition and biological living standards: adult height and mortality in 20th-century Spain.

This paper seeks new insights concerning the health transition in 20th century Spain by analyzing both traditional (mortality-based) and alternative (anthropometric-based) health indicators. Data were drawn from national censuses, vital and cause-of-death statistics and seven National Health Surveys dating from 1987 to 2006 (almost 100,000 subjects aged 20-79 were used to compute cohort height averages). A multivariate regression analysis was performed on infant mortality and economic/historical dummy variables. Our results agree with the general timing of the health transition process in Spain as has been described to date insofar as we document that there was a rapid improvement of sanitary and health care related factors during the second half of the 20th century reflected by a steady decline in infant mortality and increase in adult height. However, the association between adult height and infant mortality turned out to be not linear. In addition, remarkable gender differences emerged: mean height increased continuously for male cohorts born after 1940 but meaningful improvements in height among female cohorts was not attained until the late 1950s.

The Galician Diaspora in the Twenty-First Century: Demographic Renovation as a Response to the Economic Crisis

With the dawn of the twenty-first century and the international immigration boom in Galicia, some considered the century-long Galician diaspora to have reached its end. Nevertheless, the dramatic outbreak of the 2008 economic crisis has reactivated outward migration, now in much more complex forms. The more recent flows of Galician emigration have been fed by return trajectories of previous immigrants, some of whom have become naturalized Spanish citizens, and some of whom are accompanied by Galician-born children and spouses. These flows also include re-immigration to third countries, a process that includes those who returned home during the bonanza period only to find themselves faced with the need to emigrate yet again, as well as a new wave of Galician youth emigration. These patterns of movement take advantage of family networks established during the twentieth-century diaspora and are revitalizing the exterior population with ties to Galicia as well as the geographic extension encompassed by the Galician diaspora. The relative importance of the countries included in this territory has shifted, as has the composition of the populations in flux. In this chapter, we will pay particular attention to analyzing these latest flows and the composition of the population of the Galician expatriate community.

Longevity and Lifespan Variation by Educational Attainment in Spain: 1960–2015

For a long time, studies of socioeconomic gradients in health have limited their attention to between-group comparisons. Yet, ignoring the differences that might exist within groups and focusing on group-specific life expectancy levels and trends alone, one might arrive at overly simplistic conclusions. Using data from the Spanish Encuesta Sociodemográfica and recently released mortality files by the Spanish Statistical Office (INE), this is the first study to simultaneously document (1) the gradient in life expectancy by educational attainment groups, and (2) the inequality in age-at-death distributions within and across those groups for the period between 1960 and 2015 in Spain. Our findings suggest that life expectancy has been increasing for all education groups but particularly among the highly educated. We observe diverging trends in life expectancy, with the differences between the low- and highly educated becoming increasingly large, particularly among men. Concomitantly with increasing disparities across groups, length-of-life inequality has decreased for the population as a whole and for most education groups, and the contribution of the between-group component of inequality to overall inequality has been extremely small. Even if between-group inequality has increased over time, its contribution has been too small to have sizable effects on overall inequality. In addition, our results suggest that education expansion and declining within-group variability might have been the main drivers of overall lifespan inequality reductions. Nevertheless, the diverging trends in longevity and lifespan inequality across education groups represent an important phenomenon whose underlying causes and potential implications should be investigated in detail.

Evolución del perfil de los cuidadores de personas de 65 y más años con discapacidad en la persistencia de un modelo de cuidado familiar

INTRODUCTION The increasing participation of women in the workforce may make it difficult to sustain the current model of elderly care. The aim of this article was to determine the changing sociodemographic profile of informal elderly caregivers with disabilities, the interaction between employment and care, and the view of the public on the responsibility of that care. MATERIALS AND METHODS Cross-sectional analysis of secondary data from four national surveys were used: the disability surveys held in 1999 (N=3,936) and 2008 (N=5,257), the 2011-12 National Health Survey (N=439), and the Family and Gender survey of 2012 (N=1,359). They were analysed using contingency tables based on gender and age. RESULTS Half of the informal caregivers were women aged 45 to 64 years. Between 1999 and 2011-12 they became more concentrated in the 55-64 age-bracket, among whom participation in the workforce doubled from 20% to 40%. Increased care for men was associated with unemployment. Care work had a negative impact on working life, with greater impact among women and those who cared for elderly people with severe disabilities. Less likely to consider that elderly care provision should rest on family are 45-54 year-old economically active women (only 42%) or those who are more educated (40%), compared to 60% of economically inactive women and 55% of less educated women. CONCLUSIONS Economically active and educated women are less inclined to family-based care, but assume it independently of their workforce participation, whereas males do so according to their availability.