The Road Towards Good Vital Registration Records: The case of Brazil

Everton Lima, Centro de Desenvolvimento e Planejamento Regional (CEDEPLAR)
Bernardo L. Queiroz, Centro de Desenvolvimento e Planejamento Regional (CEDEPLAR)

This work aims to study the spatial pattern of ill-defined causes of death across the geographical areas in Brazil. The strategy to search for spatial correlations measures, which can easily be applied to identify the spatial centers of ill-defined mortality causes. In the developing countries, mortality estimates and the knowledge of the levels and trends of adult mortality is limited by the quality of available data,are limited by data quality. The most common problems faced by these countries are incomplete coverage of the vital registration system and errors in age declaration for both population and deaths counts. It is argued that, in Brazil, ill-defined causes of deaths have a negative correlation with the vital registration coverage. That is, regions that presented high levels of under-registration in the past, are now collecting more complete number of events but with worse quality, thus increasing the number of ill-defined causes.