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This paper provides to the explanation of Russian peculiarities of excess mortality among young adults. Social and economic crises of the 1990s exerted a negative effect on the demographic processes in Russia of that time. The greatest increase in mortality was observed among young adults. The long-term effects of economic and social changes have also influenced the dynamics of mortality in post-crisis generations. The fact has conditioned the Russian peculiarities of mortality among young adults. The paper presents the results of the study which explains the phenomenon of excess mortality in young adults and shows the Russian peculiarities of mortality. The author identifies the changes in age limits of excess mortality among young adults, connected with the negative dynamics of mortality within the generation of the 1970s compared with neighbouring generations. To confirm the hypothesis that the dynamics of mortality in the generation of the 1970s will be a long-term one the author resorts to APC (Age, Period, Cohort) analysis. The study confirms the high importance of the cohort effect on mortality among the generation of the 1970s. This generation is most vulnerable to mortality and shows lower rates of decline in mortality in recent years as compared to other generations. If the trend of mortality continues, the aging generation of the 1970s will increase the negative impact on further rise in anticipated life expectancy.

This study examines excess mortality in South Korea during the COVID-19 pandemic. I analyze age-specific mortality rates and present an international comparison. First, Korean excess mortality remained low until the end of 2021 but significantly increased in early 2022. Second, this excess mortality was concentrated among older people. For example, cumulative excess mortality among the population aged 85+ years until the 30th week of 2022 was approximately 1-2 percent, that is, an additional 1-2 percent of this age group died compared with what we would have expected in the absence of COVID-19. Third, the international comparison demonstrates that excess mortality in South Korea was relatively low. The country experienced one of the lowest excess mortality rates among countries under study until the end of 2021, but excess mortality rapidly increased in early 2022. However, it returned to being comparatively low by mid-2022. This comparison shows cross-national variation in excess mortality, which may be associated with policy responses and public health infrastructure. Finally, I discuss implications and opportunities for future research.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has produced vastly disproportionate deaths for communities of color in the United States. Minnesota seemingly stands out as an exception to this national pattern, with white Minnesotans accounting for 80 percent of the population and 82 percent of COVID-19 deaths. The authors examine confirmed COVID-19 mortality alongside deaths indirectly attributable to the pandemic—"excess mortality"—in Minnesota. This analysis reveals profound racial disparities: age-adjusted excess mortality rates for whites are exceeded by a factor of 2.8 to 5.3 for all other racial groups, with the highest rates among Black, Latino, and Native Minnesotans. The seemingly small disparities in COVID-19 deaths in Minnesota reflect the interaction of three factors: the natural history of the disease, whose early toll was heavily concentrated in nursing homes; an exceptionally divergent age distribution in the state; and a greatly different proportion of excess mortality captured in confirmed COVID-19 rates for white Minnesotans compared with most other groups.

In late imperial Russia, peasants were placed in an extremely difficult situation. The terms of the 1861 Emancipation had left them short of land and highly indebted to the government. Their rate of population growth was extremely high, and as Russia entered the demographic transition, it increased even more. The government was intent on a policy of rapid industrialization, which was ultimately to be paid for by large grain exports. This already strained situation was further complicated by three additional factors. Both the changing level of international grain prices and the weather-induced fluctuations in grain yields were external factors capable of applying severe shocks to the peasantry, and little could be done to affect their impact. The third factor was the effectiveness of the tsarist administrative machin-ery for levying taxes on the peasants and providing them with relief (Wheatcroft 1991: 128). © 2021 'Uchitel' Publishing House.

Some scholars argue that democratic countries are in crisis during the COVID-19 pandemic and authoritarian countries tend to combat COVID-19. However, these studies are usually based on reported data susceptible to manipulation and often overlook the variation of government effectiveness even in the same type of political regimes. Using excess mortality data from 144 countries, this study analyzed the interaction effect between political regimes and government effectiveness on excess mortality. The results revealed that democratic countries with higher government effectiveness can reduce excess mortality. This study suggests that democratic countries need not give up freedom and need to improve government effectiveness to combat COVID-19.

Rwanda experienced several firms of internal violence, including civil war,genocide, reprisal killings and (counter-)insurgency. While these events all occurred in 1990-1998, their geographic location within Rwanda differred, with the genocide especially severe in the South of the country, the civil war and reprisal killings mostly taking place in the North and East, and the (counter-)insurgency concentrated in the Northwest. In order to assess the relative impact of the different firms of violence, this article derives a detailed spatial pattern of excess mortality from the population census. In line with previous evidence on the death toll of firmed conflict in Rwanda, we find significant high-high excess mortality clusters in the southern province of Butare, in and around Kigali City, and in the eastern province Kibungo. Furthfirmore, we present the first quantitative evidence to date of high excess mortality in the northwestern porvince Gisenyi, indicating that the 1995-1998 (counter-)insurgency inflicted a much higher death toll on the population than presently acknowledged by the Rwandan government, the UN and large western donors.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic began in China in November 2019, and spread to most countries around the world in the early 2020, causing a large increase in deaths. The aim of the study described in this paper is to estimate and analyse the geographical and temporal variations in excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 in Poland and its regions. The study took into consideration variables such as sex, age and the stage of the pandemic in correlation with the reported number of COVID-19 deaths and the reported number of SARS-CoV-2 virus infections. The standard weekly mortality rate in Poland in 2020 was calculated using the method of time series analysis taking into account weekly seasonal fluctuations in the mortality rate throughout the year, indicated with data reported by registry offices and published by Statistics Poland. The obtained results showed that in 2020, there were approximately 71,000 deaths above the standard number in Poland, most of which, i.e. about 91%, were the deaths of people aged 60 and over. Out of them, only less than 30,000 deaths were reported as deaths caused by COVID-19, which was only about 41% of all excess deaths in this period. The number of excess deaths peaked in the 45th week of 2020, which was the time when the largest number of cases of COVID-19 infection were reported, and not when the largest number of deaths from COVID-19 occurred (which was three weeks later). However, it has not been established yet whether the reason for this situation was an imperfect way of determining the causes of deaths at the beginning of the pandemic, or the excessive burden hospitals were subjected to that caused the increase in deaths from other causes.

The degree to which biological factors contribute to the existence and the widening of mortality differences by sex remains unclear. To address this question, a mortality analysis for the years 1890 to 1995 was performed comparing mortality data on more than 11,000 Catholic nuns and monks in Bavarian communities living in very nearly identical behavioral and environmental conditions with life table data for the general German population. While the mortality differences between women and men in the general German population increased considerably after World War II, they remained almost constant among the members of Bavarian religious orders during the entire observation period, with slight advantages for nuns. Thus, the higher differences observable in the general population cannot be attributed to biological factors. The different trends in sex‐specific mortality between the general and the cloistered populations are caused exclusively by men in the general population who were unable to follow the trend in mortality reduction of women, nuns, and especially monks. Under the special environmental conditions of nuns and monks, biological factors appear to confer a maximum survival advantage for women of no more than one year in remaining life expectancy at young adult ages.