Measuring Inequality in Early Mortality Across All Births in the Developing World

University Of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

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Abstract

Project Summary/Abstract Dr. Antonio Pedro Ramos graduated with a PhD in Political Science in 2015 and an MS in Statistics in 2014, both from UCLA. His dissertation investigated the effects of recent democratization waves on infant and child mortality among the poor in developing countries. In his graduate work, health indicators were used as a tool to test political economy theories, and thus were not the main focus of his analysis. This fellowship will allow Dr. Ramos to obtain the demographic, statistical and health policy expertise to transit from being a political scientist to become a health scholar working with health inequality. One fundamental dimension of social inequality is inequality in early-life survival. To date, most studies on early-life mortality analyze between-group comparisons, such as income groups within the same country, and they have documented large disparities. While between-group differences are informative they mask important disparities in the mortality risk within groups. Dr Ramos' proposed project is to develop methodologies that (1) can measure inequality in early-life mortality among all births and (2) improve policy targeting by identifying small cells of high risk births that are nested within and across large groups of births. During the K99 phase, with supervision from his mentors, Dr. Ramos will develop the methodologies that can be used to characterize and explain inequality in early-life mortality across all births and identify high risk births. His methods will be tested on a data set he already acquired that includes records on 5.5 million births from 50 developing countries. In his R00 phase, he will implement large-scale analysis by combining data from multiple sources to produce globals maps of health inequality and high risk births, as well as examine the impact of health policies on reducing child mortality. UCLA is the ideal place for Dr. Ramos' training and research in public health and applied statistics because of its unique combination of expertise. This includes Dr. Ramos' mentoring team, several other scholars that work on similar topics in various academic centers, classes, seminars, and computational and technical resources that are available at UCLA. Dr. Ramos is contributing to research and policy practice by developing a methodology that will allow re- searchers and policymakers to measure inequality in early mortality across births and to identify high risk births regardless of their large group membership. By doing so, this project will be the ?rst to: 1) draw a time-varying map of total inequality in early mortality across the developing world; 2) identify major correlates of these dispar- ities; and 3) develop more cost effective public health policies.