DEPOK – Lembaga Demografi Faculty of Economics and Business Universitas Indonesia held a Regular Seminar which took place in Kartono Gunawan Room, LD FEB UI building, on Monday (7/5/2018).
This Regular Seminar is titled “The Biological Standard of Living in Indonesia during the 20th Century: Evidence from the Age at Menarche”. The speaker for this seminar was Dr. Pierre van der Eng as Associate Professor in International Business at the Australian National University (ANU).
The topic that was brought discussed about the analyses long-term changes in the mean age at menarche (MAM) as a biological indicator of changes in the standard of living in Indonesia. It finds that MAM may have been 15,5 for birth cohorts in the late-19th century, decreasing to 14,5 by the 1930s, at which level it stagnated until the gradual decrease resumed after the early 1960s to around 12,5 in the mid 2000s. In this discussion assumed that long-term improvements in nutrition, educational attainment and health care explain these trends.
An international comparison of long-term MAM changes finds that MAM in Indonesia was much lower than in Korea and China until respectively 1970 and 1990, but comparable to Japan until 1950 and to Malaysia until 1930. Furthermore, presents reasons why these differences are unlikely to be related to dissimilarities in ethnicity and climate, and concludes that they are indicative of relative standards of living. (Nino Eka Putra)
