Barbara A. Anderson

All of my work is about the relation between social and economic change and demographic change.  I have worked in these areas on the Russian Empire, Soviet Union and former Soviet Union, China, and South Africa. Much of my recent work has been on South Africa.  South Africa is a beautiful country, but the main reason I work there are that rural Africans in South Africa face many of the same problems as Africans elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, but South Africa has the most numerous and highest quality data available anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa.  Among the questions I have worked on in South Africa are African and Coloured infant and child survival, causes and patterns of adult mortality, trends in orphanhood, perceptions of environmental problems and actions taken to address these problems, changes in material standard of living and characteristics of the growing African middle class.