Social science has made great strides over the last half-century, with some of the most significant gains made in micro-level studies. However, analysts interested in broad societal change will not be satisfied with this micro-level detail alone. They will find the detail useful, but they still need to convert the micro-level relations into macro-level outcomes. Decomposition methods rooted in demography can help in those situations. This chapter discusses how these decomposition methods can build on other methods traditionally used in the social sciences. It specifies the kind of problems that are well suited for decomposition analysis, and it briefly reviews three basic types of decomposition approaches (demographic, regression, and mathematical). We illustrate, using mortality data as an example, and conclude with some suggestions for how this method might more broadly advance macrosocial research.
Part of the book: Demographic Analysis
The last half century has seen seismic transformations in the demographic outlook of many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Because these transformations have coincided with equally profound economic change, they raise questions about the role of demographic change and its dividends in transforming the developing world. For instance, how much have the differences in onset, patterns, and management of fertility transitions fueled the growing economic divergence now seen across these regions? On the one hand, the four Asian Tigers reportedly leveraged their fertility transition to accelerate economic growth. On the other hand, a few countries in West Africa have yet to initiate their fertility transition, and the list of least-developed nations is increasingly restricted to African and high-fertility nations. In this chapter, we use new decomposition methods to estimate the dividends accrued by individual countries between 1970 and 2020 and to explore how these dividends contributed to the region’s economic growth and differentiation. The analysis begins by estimating the size of each country’s dividend; then, we consider factors that explain differences across national dividends. Finally, we estimate the percent contribution of this variation in dividends in explaining the cross-country variation in the economic outlook of this world region.
Part of the book: Recent Trends in Demographic Data [Working title]