Assessing Trends and Levels in Mortality in the Newly Independent States: Cautionary Notes

This paper discusses issues in data quality that affect the interpretation of reported mortality levels and trends in the Newly Independent States. The authors present an overview of data quality issues for readers who are not necessarily specialists in demography or familiar with the quality and types of data that are available from this part of the world. They examine data from selected regions and dates, while drawing the reader's attention to broader issues and the existing literature on the quality of data from the former Soviet Union. Russia and Latvia serve as cases in which the reported adult mortality patterns and evidence of increasing mortality can be believed. The cases are fairly typical of the European part of the former Soviet Union. The authors focus most of their attention, however, on the former Soviet Central Asian republics plus Kazakhstan and Azerbaidzhan. These are cases in which real levels and trends in mortality in the past and present are obscured by data error. To aid in this interpretation, the authors also draw on some detailed data from Xinjiang (in China), in which one finds major ethnic groups that are culturally similar to Turkic groups in former Soviet Central Asia.

Data used: Life tables and census data from the Soviet Union and its successor states; 1990 Census data from the People's Republic of China.