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The US fertility transition in the nineteenth century is unusual. Not only did it start from a very high fertility level and very early in the nation’s development, but it also took place long before the nation’s mortality transition, industrialization, and urbanization. This paper assembles new county-level, household-level, and individual-level data, including new complete-count IPUMS microdata databases of the 1830–1880 censuses, to evaluate different theories for the nineteenth-century American fertility transition. We construct cross-sectional models of net fertility for currently-married white couples in census years 1830–1880 and test the results with a subset of couples linked between the 1850–1860, 1860–1870, and 1870–1880 censuses. We find evidence of marital fertility control consistent with hypotheses as early as 1830. The results indicate support for several different but complementary theories of the early US fertility decline, including the land availability, conventional structuralist, ideational, child demand/quality-quantity tradeoff, and life cycle savings theories.

This paper presents the second-generation estimates for the Italian engineering industry in 1911, a year documented both by the customary demographic census, and the first industrial census. The first part of this paper uses the census data to estimate the industry’s value added, sector by sector; the second further disaggregates each sector by activity, and estimates the value added, employment, physical product, and metal consumption of each one. A third, concluding section dwells on the dependence of cross-section estimates on time-series evidence. Three appendices detail the specific algorithms that generate the present estimates; a fourth, a useful sample of firm-specific data.

Collection of data about disability in a census or survey context is influenced by the cultural context, particularly the beliefs and practices within the communities where the data are collected. Attitudes toward individuals with disability will influence what questions are asked, how such questions are framed, and how individuals in the community will respond to these questions. This article examines how culturally defined concepts of disability influence the development of questions on the topic, as well as helps determine who asks the questions and who answers the questions. These issues in turn influence how much data are collected and how accurate the data are. It also examines how ethnic diversity and poverty contribute to these questions. Recommendations for attention to these issues are made by census and survey.

Population censuses collect socio-demographic and economic information regularly and in an institutionalized manner. The decision of what topics to include in their questionnaires reflects political priorities, but also it is a materialization of symbolic power (Bourdieu, 1991; Loveman, 2005). Gender practices – including budgeting, policy-making, implementation and monitoring of programs – depend significantly on census results. Understanding the institutional dynamics of public statistics sheds light on structural obstacles to exercise gender rights. To study this phenomenon, the authors look at the last century of the Brazilian and Ecuadorian censuses. The research provides a better understanding about the process of including or rejecting questions related to gender, specifically the arguments used in the process of selecting questions. Brazil and Ecuador were chosen because of the different profiles of each of their statistical institutions. The Brazilian institute, IBGE, is a larger, stable and semi-autonomous statistical office; Brazil has conducted population censuses since the nineteenth century. The Ecuadorian institute, INEC, is a smaller and more politically dependent statistical office; it has conducted population censuses since 1950.

Using archival analysis within the questionnaires and interviewing key demographers, activists and statisticians in both countries, the authors argue that the presence or absence of gender questions in the Brazilian and Ecuadorian censuses is historically and politically contingent. In contrast to the dominant narrative that suggests that changes in the vision of public statistics is correlated with the modernization of the state, it appears that the statistical visibility of gender issues in each society does not follow a linear path.

In the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) 2001, the World Health Organization (WHO) defines disability as: ‘an umbrella term for impairments, activity limitations and participation restrictions. It denotes the negative aspects of the interaction between an individual (with a health condition) and that individual's contextual factors (environmental and personal factors)’, with environmental factors including assistance from other people, from equipment and from formal sources. WHO previously defined disability, in the context of health experience, as “any restriction or lack (resulting from impairment) of ability to perform an action in the manner or within the range considered normal for a human being” (World Health Organization, 1980, p. 28).

This chapter uses the historian’s method of micro-history to rethink the significance of the Supreme Court decision Muller v. Oregon (1908). Muller is typically considered a labor law decision permitting the regulation of women’s work hours. However, this chapter argues that through particular attention to the specific context in which the labor dispute took place – the laundry industry in Portland, Oregon – the Muller decision and underlying conflict should be understood as not only about sex-based labor rights but also about how the labor of laundry specifically involved race-based discrimination. This chapter investigates the most important conflicts behind the Muller decision, namely the entangled histories of white laundresses’ labor and labor activism in Portland, as well as the labor of their competitors – Chinese laundrymen. In so doing, this chapter offers an intersectional reading of Muller that incorporates regulations on Chinese laundries and places the decision in conversation with a long line of anti-Chinese laundry legislation on the West Coast, including that at issue in Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886).

It is generally difficult for the government to come up with any meaningful programs for persons with disabilities (PWDs) unless statistics to that effect have been made available. Disability Statistics in Uganda is one of those areas of social statistics which has been growing at a slow pace in the past compared to other socioeconomic indicators, but now is an area of growing concern and picking up steadily. Censuses have remained the major data providers for disability statistics and the first of which was the 1991 census. The 2002 census similarly collected information on PWDs, and this information is to be widely disseminated at national and lower levels. Both censuses were conducted by the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS). UBOS has collected similar but a little more detailed information on disability using two household surveys.

However for effective program design, implementation and resource allocation for PWDs, a lot needs to be done in terms of harmonizing the concepts on disability with the International Classification of Functional Disability and Health (ICF). The power of the census results is that it provides data to the lowest administrative level. Conducting a fully fledged national survey for PWDs will provide adequate baseline data for meaningful purposes and priority issues for government and other users.

This report provides information on the various sources of disability data and how concepts are defined by each institution. It highlights the Uganda Bureau of Statistics, Ministry of Education and Sports (Annual School Census and the Department for Special Needs), Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development (Community-Based Rehabilitation Program) and the Ministry of Health as data collecting institutions. It is noted that each institution use different concepts and methodology for data collection. Engaging both users and producers in the disability data production process, encouraging regular dialogue and establishing collaborative arrangements with local and international research institutions are avenues for utilizing the scarce resources for the development of disability statistics. The focus and direction of the development of disability statistics in Uganda calls for a sustained system of monitoring intervention that government and other development partners have to put in place.

The issues raised in this report will facilitate the process of harmonisation of concepts and definitions used while collecting disability data. It is noted that except for the Community-Based Rehabilitation Information pilot system under the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development, there is little or no use at all of the ICF. The pilot system is ongoing and is expected to expand to other districts. It is hoped that this will enrich the process of harmonizing concepts with the Integrated Community-Based Rehabilitation Information System to provide meaningful results. The process of coordination is hereby called for.

This study examines a sharp decline of school attendance among white children in the Southern US after the Civil War. According to Census data, the school-attendance rate among whites in the Confederate states declined by almost half from 1860 to 1870, whereas the rate in Northern states was approximately stable. This shock left the South approximately three decades behind its antebellum trend. We account for little of this drop with household variables plausibly affected by the War. However, a select few county-level variables (notably the drop in wealth) explains around half of the decline, which suggests a systemic explanation. We adopt a model-based approach to decomposing the decline in schooling into demand versus supply factors. On the supply side, the region saw a decline in wealth and public resources, but we observe a stable relationship between time in school and literacy or adult occupation, which is not consistent with a contracting constraint on school quantity or quality. Nevertheless, further research is required to determine how much the contraction in school access affected attendance. On the demand-side, we present suggestive evidence of a decline in the return to school (measured by the relative wage of engineers to laborers). Relatedly, we see a “brain drain”: in longitudinally linked census samples, educated Southerners were more likely to migrate out of the South after the War.

The application of forecasting to health care is not new. A frequent issue in many Inpatient Rehabilitation Facilities (IRFs) is the fluctuating and unpredictable census. With scarce resources, particularly physical therapists and occupational therapists, this unpredictability makes appropriate scheduling of these resources challenging. This research addresses the issue of patient admissions in an inpatient rehabilitation facility attached to an 861 bed level-one trauma hospital. The goal is to develop a predictive model for the IRF's Census to assist in resource planning (e.g., labor, beds, and materials).