Kitagawa Decomposition
Kitagawa decomposition is a demographic technique that splits the difference between two summary rates — such as two crude death rates, birth rates, or prevalence figures — into the part attributable to differences in the underlying group-specific rates and the part attributable to differences in population composition. Introduced by Evelyn Kitagawa in 1955, it answers whether a gap between two populations reflects genuinely different risks or merely a different age (or other) structure.
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Sources
- Kitagawa, E. M. (1955). Components of a difference between two rates. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 50(272), 1168–1194. DOI: 10.1080/01621459.1955.10501299 ↗
- Preston, S. H., Heuveline, P., & Guillot, M. (2001). Demography: Measuring and Modeling Population Processes. Blackwell. ISBN: 9781557864512
How to cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Kitagawa Decomposition of a Difference Between Two Rates. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/demography/kitagawa-decomposition
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