The work carried out during the reporting period consisted in three main tasks, which aimed to reach the objectives planned in the action: (1) Data source review: data inventory and analysis for potential international comparison; (2) establishing collaborations with colleagues at the beneficiary institution and in other institutions; (3) data analysis and the estimation of demographic indicators.
1) A thoroughly review of potential data sources in Venezuela and neighboring countries have been conducted. The review included administrative records, vital statistics, thematic surveys, population census and international demographic estimates. This first data inventory is useful when aiming international comparisons and to guide the research on migrant’s events (births, deaths, migration) in Latin America. The project has undergone the revision accessing the potential usefulness of less traditional demographic sources to produce real time data in need when humanitarian crises are taking place.
2) The second important task of the action has been to establish collaborations within and outside the beneficiary institution. At Johns Hopkins University, the researcher joined the Centre for Humanitarian Health (CHH), a global leader in humanitarian crisis assessment, including that of the current Venezuelan crisis. Further collaborations have been stablished with researchers in the Department of Social Sciences at New York University Abu Dhabi, and the Research Institute for Economic and Social sciences (IIES for its acronym in Spanish) at the Andrés Bello University in Venezuela (UCAB for its acronym in Spanish), among others ongoing collaborations with Latin American and European scholars.
3) The third task is the actual empirical analysis of the data. The main deliverables of the action (data management plan [DMP], Protection of personal data plan [POPDR], Ethics Requirements [NEC]), have been submitted on time, and approved. The researcher has focused on the analysis of publicly available data coming from the main destinations for Venezuelan abroad, such as Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Mexico, United States and Spain, especially, data coming from the Civil Registration and Vital Statistics systems, Population Census and administrative records of Venezuelan stocks.
Three main conclusions derive from the results of the action. First, despite the fact that the crisis in Venezuela remains slightly below the limits of a humanitarian crisis (doubling of mortality over baseline rates), the protracted nature of the crisis has severely impact the population who remains in the country, e.g. there are over 40,000 excess infant deaths and 4.73 million displaced persons due to the crisis. The demographic changes brought about by the crisis in Venezuela have undermined the functionality of its future labor market and called into question the intergenerational healthcare system. Second, the heterogeneous characteristics of the outflows from Venezuela resulted in a diversity of outcomes on how population experiences their vital events amidst the migration. Whereas inflows of middle and upper classes at the beginning of the crisis (up to 2016) have benefited of better health outcomes in their main destinations than natives; more recent inflows (2017-2020) have performed worse off than the native population. Third, despite large improvements in quality and completeness, the Civil Registration and Vital Statistics systems in Latin America still lack well-referenced data for keeping track of migrant’s vital events. The main bottleneck comes from the data collection; migratory status or nativity of the parents is not always included in the official forms nor adapted to the national legal framework.
