A Micro Analysis of the Infant Mortality Decline in an Italian Sharecropping Community from 1900 to 1939

In the first decades of the twentieth century, an evident reduction of the infant mortality rate occurred in Italy. In previous studies, less attention has been devoted to the effects of individual bio-demographic and socioeconomic components on infant mortality. We use micro data from births, deaths and marriages civil registers of Granarolo, an Italian rural municipality close to Bologna, from 1900 to 1939. We are able to reconstruct some typical bio-demographic characteristics and the socioeconomic status of parents. In these terms, the analysis includes: parity, age of the mother, previous birth interval and child survival, father’s occupations and literacy, season and year of birth. Cox and Piecewise constant exponential models are used to estimate the effects of the selected predictors. We found that still in the first four decades of the twentieth century rural daily wagers experienced a lower level in infant survivor, whereas the upper class registered significantly higher ones.