Recent Demographic Developments in France: Seasonal Patterns of Births, Deaths, Unions, and Migration
Didier Breton, Magali Barbieri, Hippolyte d’Albis, Magali Mazuy
On 1 January 2018, the population of France stood at 66.9 million – 122,300 more than the previous year, though mean annual growth and especially natural growth were the lowest they have been in 20 years. Total fertility continued to fall, particularly among the youngest women. The number of residence permits issued rose in 2016 (to about 220,000). Marriages of both opposite- and same-sex couples continued to fall. Mortality fell once again in 2017, but there were over 600,000 deaths, reflecting the ageing of the population. The causes of death that show the most worrying trends are cancer in women, mental disorders, and diseases of the nervous system. Demographic events are spread unevenly through the year: marriages and the start of consensual unions happen most often in spring and summer, births in summer and autumn, immigrant arrivals also in summer and autumn, while the winter is marked by a resurgence of civil union registrations and peaks in mortality.
Immigrant Emigration: An Overlooked Dimension of Geographical Mobility
Matthieu Solignac
This article analyses the geographical mobility of immigrants with respect to natives, taking account of departures from the receiving country. While the residential mobility of most natives is confined within national borders, a large proportion of immigrants return to their country of birth or depart to another international destination. However, as retrospective methods are generally applied to study residential mobility, and suitable data on departures from the national territory are lacking, these emigration flows are often overlooked. Adopting a novel approach, this study analyses rates of departure from French municipalities, for whatever destination. Based entirely on the follow-up of individual movements, this approach moves beyond the dichotomy between internal and international migration to provide an overall measure of mobility, including emigration. Using a large set of administrative panel data representative of the general population, drawn from full censuses and civil records, this study was able to systematically follow all individual trajectories on the territory of metropolitan France between 1968 and 1999 while remaining representative of the population
as a whole. Levels of immigrant mobility prove to be much higher than those habitually measured using retrospective methods. They are 30–50% higher than those of natives. Between one-quarter and one-third of immigrants observed in a given census have left France within seven to nine years.
Observing the Number of Children with EU -SILC: A Quantification of Biases
Angela Greulich, Aurélien Dasré
Various fields of research increasingly use the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) database because of its large country coverage, the availability of harmonized socioeconomic measures, and the possibility of merging partners. Its measures of the number of children risk being biased, however, because the questionnaire does not directly ask about the number of children ever born to a woman or man,
and only those children who live in the parental household are observed. These limitations are problematic not only for demographic but also for socioeconomic analysis because family size and fertility behaviour are important determinants of income and living conditions. To raise awareness of this issue, we analyse the quality of the measure of the number of children in EU-SILC. For ten countries, we first quantify the bias in the reported
number of children, distinguishing fertility measures by age and birth order. We then identify the socioeconomic profiles that are most subject to biased measures.
Circumstances and Causes of Death Among Prisoners in France: The Preponderance of Violent Deaths
Aline Désesquelles, Annie Kensey, France Meslé
This study provides a full table of the mortality of prisoners in France. It is based on the 246 files archived at the French Ministry of Justice for individuals who died in 2011. Seven out of ten deaths were violent, primarily suicides and drug overdoses or medicinal poisonings. The analysis confirms excess mortality from suicide among male prisoners compared with the general population, as well as excess mortality due to other violent causes. Conversely, natural-cause mortality is lower among male prisoners than for males in the general population. The use of suspensions of sentence for medical reasons partly explains this result. For a given age group, the perpetrators of serious offences present a higher risk of death, whether due to violence or natural causes, than the perpetrators of less serious offences. The risk of violent death is also higher among pretrial detainees than among convicts. The description of the circumstances of death highlights the need for better alert systems and improved management of health incidents, especially at night.
Undoing and Redoing an At-risk Group: The Objectivation and Prevention of AIDS Among Male Homosexuals in the Antiretroviral Era
Mathieu Trachman, Maud Gelly, Gabriel Girard
Policies on the fight against HIV and AIDS have changed considerably in France since the 2000s. In the 1990s, the fight against HIV became a national cause, the preventive initiatives of which addressed the entire population to avoid any stigmatization. In the 2000s, recognizing the existence of “high-risk groups” no longer posed a problem and determined more targeted action. In response to the resurgence in risk-taking, the players involved in these efforts worked to understand groups through the close observation of their behaviour. Focusing on male homosexuals, the article analyses two recent innovations embodying this trend: the demedicalization of screening and pre-exposure prophylaxis. These developments show that the observed changes are not simply about expressing what should not be said, but instead involve renewed work on objectivation, the mobilization of members of the target population, and a certain idea of the risk-taking individual. The detection of at-risk behaviour also serves to delimit the populations with which intervention is possible and the implementation of the necessary tools.
Indigenous Identification and Transitions in Australia: Exploring New Findings from a Linked Micro-dataset
Paul Campbell, Nicholas Biddle, Yin Paradies
Indigenous Australians make up a small segment of the country’s population, but one with a distinct demographic profile. Academics and the central statistical agency of Australia regularly create Indigenous-specific population estimates. Changes in the identification (from Indigenous to non-Indigenous or vice versa) contribute to that population’s dynamic. Until now, however, there has been no individual-level Australian population
data that would allow researchers to analyse the characteristics of those whose identification changes. This paper explores a new data source containing the largest longitudinal sample of Indigenous Australians, the Australian Census Longitudinal Dataset. We show, quantitatively, that Indigenous identification is not necessarily a fixed construct. New identification appears to account for a considerable proportion of the growth in
the Indigenous population between 2006 and 2011. The newly identified group also appear to possess different characteristics to those who consistently identified as Indigenous across the two time points. They were more likely to live in urban areas (and unlikely to live in remote communities) and had higher socioeconomic status, a finding that has implications for policy design and implementation.
