Educational attainment and adult mortality differentials in Argentina

MANZELLI, HERNÁN

Revista Latinoamericana de Población

Asociación Latinoamericana de Población

Lugar: Buenos Aires; Año: 2014 vol. 8 p. 129 - 163

2175-8581

Manzelli, H., 2014. Educational attainment and adult mortality differentials in Argentina, Revista Latinoamericana de Población, Año 8 (4): 129-163. ISSN: 2175-8581.  ·        Indexada: Los artículos publicados en Revista Latinoamericana de Población están indexados por: Latindex - Catálogo (Sistema Regional de Información en Línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina, el Caribe, España y Portugal);  Qualis/Capes - B1. The study of the relationship between socioeconomic characteristics and mortality patterns has been a traditional research area of demographic analysis. In Latin America, there is an important set of studies that show a significant inverse relationship between socioeconomic status and mortality rates. However, mainly due to specific limitations in the available data, we know very little about the specific relation between educational attainment and adult mortality. This inverse relationship between educational attainment and mortality rates provides just the tip of the iceberg for a large set of questions: Does the association between education and adult mortality vary by age group? Does this association vary by sex, or by geographical region? The main objective of this paper is to describe the relationship of adult mortality to educational attainment in Argentina for the year 2010. The data used in this study come from the Argentinean Mortality File of 2010 and from the last Argentinean Census. A multiple imputation procedure is used for predicting missing cases in the variable education. Results show a clear gradient in the specific mortality rates according to educational groups, for both sexes and for all age groups. The existence and direction of this relationship was as expected; however, the magnitude of educational differences was much higher than what has been found in other countries. For example, mortality ratios between the young with lowest education and the young with highest education were next to 7, both for men and women.  The data also exhibited a clear declining trend in mortality inequalities by education as age increased. In particular, the younger age groups had much higher mortality ratios than the older age groups. Moreover, educational inequalities in death are stronger for men than for women. Clearly, young low educated men appear to exhibit the highest relative mortality disadvantages in Argentina.