2004. Analysis of Adult Mortality Within Rural Households

BACKGROUND: This paper has four main objectives: 1) To present a cost-effective method of investigating the effect of prime-age mortality on rural households by adding a mortality component to on-going nationally-representative household surveys; 2) to investigate who is afflicted with prime-age mortality due to illness, by analyzing the characteristics of the deceased individuals (gender, age, and position within the household at the time of death) and of the affected households (geographic location, and ex post income and landholding); 3) to investigate how the households with prime-age (PA; 15-49 years of age) adult death or illness respond by adjusting household composition and their agricultural activities; and 4) to discuss the implications of household responses to PA adult death for agricultural policies and programs, and for their role in mitigating the effects of PA adult mortality. To this end, information on household demographics for the 1999-2002 period is used to analyze changes in household size and composition for both affected and non-affected households. Next, information from the death/departure and illness demographic survey components about household response strategies are evaluated by characteristics of the deceased individual as well as of the household to better understand the factors that influence the choice of adjustment response