Measuring population pressure on the landscape: comparative GIS studies in China,India, and the United States

Measures of the effects of population pressure on the landscape using traditional methods for classifying urban territory are inadequate. The crude scale at which population densities are calculated and dependence on country-specific administration divisions hinder their ability to address such questions as the environmental impacts of cities and suburbs and make cross-national comparisons particularly difficult. This paper examines comparative urbanization measures among three case studies: the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong Province of China, the Indian state of Kerala, and the southern part of Florida in the United States. It proposes a measure based on the distribution of local population densities, taking advantage of the detailed data on small area populations and land area available in modern censuses and model-derived population databases such as LandScan, and the increasing potential of spatial analysis using geographic information systems (GIS). Examined with a similar set of thresholds, the resulting density distributions offer the potential to show better the ecological effects of population than do traditional measures.

Florida’s Changing Rainbow: Identifying Emerging Markets Through the Examination of Racial Composition and Demographic Change in Florida

Minority groups, including African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians, especially in a growing middle class, comprise an emerging market in the United States (Schwartz, Global Business Network, 2000). It is estimated that through 2025, the population of ethnic minorities in the United States will grow eight times faster than the White population; by the year 2050, some estimates project that “minorities” will make up nearly 50% of the United States population. As minority groups continue to grow in population, wealth, and buying power, it becomes imperative that businesses understand the differences among different segments of the population that will be consuming their products. This paper examines projected demographic changes for the State of Florida and the implications these changes have on increasing market opportunities for businesses. Researchers from the Northeast Florida Center for Community Initiatives used Geographic information systems (GIS) computer applications to conduct spatial analysis of U.S. Census Data, as well as proprietary economic and social indicators, to develop an analysis of distribution of certain ethnicities in Florida. The purpose of this paper is to identify potential areas of significant emerging market populations within Florida in order to improve service outreach for various economic opportunities during the coming decade.

Mother’s,Household, and Community U.S. Migration Experience and Infant Mortality in Rural and Urban Mexico

This study explores rural and urban differences in the relationship between U.S. migration experience measured at the individual, household, and community levels and individual-level infant mortality outcomes in a national sample of recent births in Mexico. Using 2000 Mexican Census data and multi-level regression models, we find that women’s own U.S. migration experience is associated with lower odds of infant mortality in both rural and urban Mexico, possibly reflecting a process of healthy migrant selectivity. Household migration has mixed blessings for infant health in rural places: remittances are beneficial for infant survival, but recent out-migration is disruptive. Recent community-level migration experience is not significantly associated with infant mortality overall, although in rural places, there is some evidence that higher levels of community migration are associated with lower infant mortality. Household- and community-level migration have no relationship with infant mortality in urban places. Thus, international migration is associated with infant outcomes in Mexico in fairly complex ways, and the relationships are expressed most profoundly in rural areas of Mexico.

NIVAH: a composite index measuring violence and harm in the U.S.

The National Index of Violence and Harm (NIVAH) tracks levels of violence and harm in the United States and identifies trends over the study period 1995–2003. NIVAH is comprised of nineteen variables in the areas of interpersonal, intrapersonal, institutional and structural violence and harm as experienced by people in the U.S. Two composite indexes are formed to describe overall trends in the realms of personal and societal violence. In addition to describing the Index’s construction and most recent conclusions, various methodological issues and their impacts on index findings are investigated.

The changing nature of wage inequality

The paper reviews recent developments in the literature on wage inequality with a particular focus on why inequality growth has been particularly concentrated in the top end of the wage distribution over the last 15 years. Several possible institutional and demand-side explanations are discussed for the secular growth in wage inequality in the United States and other advanced industrialized countries.

Causality Chains in the International Migration Systems Approach

Research into international migration lacks a commonly accepted theoretical framework, which would facilitate the accumulation of knowledge. This article aims to be a first attempt to construct such a framework and to incorporate causalities in the international migration systems approach. The author presents a theoretical framework in which four groups of factors acting on international migration are distinguished: economic, social, political and “linkages.” The causalities in this framework are derived from different international migration theories. The various positions of these whole theories within the framework are shown as causality chains. In a way, these causality chains form the time dimension of an international migration system

Legal Protections and Advocacy for Contingent or “Casual” Workers in the United States: A Case Study in Day Labor

Contingent, non-standard or “casual” work is present in large numbers in virtually every sector of the United States economy. Staffing strategies that use subcontracted or contingent work – strategies that once characterized only some low-wage workers such as garment and agriculture – have now spread to virtually every area of industry, including high tech and finance. United States law is a patchwork of provisions in separate federal statutes – and sometimes in each of the 50 states – governing whether a particular individual is an “employee.” Day laborers in the United States have particular challenging enforcing their limited rights. To address the issues of vulnerable low-wage workers being locked out of labor protections, activists have developed a number of strategies, including litigation and legislative campaigns. These strategies have more recently been broadened to facilitate developing leadership in a new social movement. In this article I draw a portrait of the day labor workforce from city- and state-based surveys of day laborers themselves. I then discuss strategies employed by day laborers to advance their workplace rights.

Fertility, child care outside the home, and pay-as-you-go social security

We examine the long-run effects of the pay-as-you-go (PAYG) social security scheme on fertility and welfare of individuals in an overlapping generations model, assuming that child-care services are available in the market. We show that the impact of a tax increase on fertility depends on the relative magnitudes of the standard intergenerational redistribution effect through the social security system, the (implicit) subsidy effect through tax-exemption of child rearing at home, and the price effect through changes in the relative price of market child care, and that if parental child-rearing time is inelastic, a tax cut could bring about a Pareto-improving allocation.

Large,But Adaptable? A Successful Population Policy and Its Long Term Effects

A restrictive population policy led to almost doubling the number of newborns from one year to another in Romania in the 1960s. Twenty years later, this large generation (of women) enters a marriage market with few eligible older mates, in a society where marriage is a must. In this article, I analyze this social experiment within the broader frame of the marriage squeeze/two sex models. Using various data from censuses and surveys, I argue that the marriage market is flexible even when is confronted with disproportionately large cohorts. If the social pressure toward marriage is strong, the marriage rates do not necessarily fall, but the mating age patterns change.

Sacrificing Their Careers for Their Families? An Analysis of the Penalty to Motherhood in Europe

This paper examines the extent of and the mechanisms behind the penalty to motherhood in six European countries. Each country provides different levels of support for maternal employment allowing us to determine institutional effects on labour market outcome. While mothers tend to earn less than non-mothers, the penalty to motherhood is considerably lower in countries with policy support for working mothers. The paper establishes the United Kingdom and West Germany to have the least policy support for working mothers as well as the largest penalties to motherhood.

The Digital Divide Across All Citizens of the World: A New Concept

This paper is concerned with the requirements for and implications of, moving from the confines of the conventional concept of the digital divide to one that reflects a world distribution of Internet users with different income levels, with particular reference to those users living in poverty. The first part of the note provides a simple, sequential, two-country illustration of what such a transition would entail. The resulting framework is then used to revisit the much-discussed issue of recent changes in Internet use between rich and poor countries. One mechanism that is associated with the revised concept is shown to substantially reduce the size of the digital divide as conventionally measured. The other mechanism, by contrast, works in the opposite direction because the increased number of users in developing countries are drawn from high-income, educated and urban classes, creating a highly unequal distribution within these countries.

A cost valuation model based on a stochastic representation of the IPAT equation

Within the framework of models for human-driven environmental impact based on the IPAT equation, we develop a model for the evolution of impact (expressed in terms of carbon dioxide emissions) and for the valuation of the economic cost associated to its reduction. We use a stochastic representation of the IPAT equation that is alternative to the STIRPAT model. This first step leads to a stochastic differential equations model that describes trends in carbon dioxide emissions on the basis of economic and demographic dynamics. As an example, we estimate the model parameters for the United States. We then use this framework to build a model for the assessment of the economic costs related to a reduction of carbon dioxide emissions for a country committed to respect an international agreement, such as the Kyoto protocol. In particular, we show that the adherence to an environmental treaty may be traced back to a problem of cost valuation and to a decision under risk. This allows us to use the mathematical tools that have been developed in quantitative finance, in the context of option pricing, to determine the expected investment that is required to reduce the emissions of a country by a certain amount and within a well-defined temporal frame.

How Can Children Tell Us About Their Wellbeing? Exploring the Potential of Participatory Research Approaches within <Emphasis Type="Italic">Young Lives</Emphasis>

‘Wellbeing’ is a key concept in the study of children’s lives over time, given its potential to link the objective, subjective, and inter-subjective dimensions of their experiences in ways that are holistic, contextualized and longitudinal. For this reason wellbeing is one of the core concepts used by Young Lives, a 15-year project (2000–2015) that follows the lives of 12,000 children growing up in the context of poverty in Ethiopia, Peru, Vietnam and Andhra Pradesh (India) (see ). This paper examines a selection of methods being used by Young Lives to capture aspects of child wellbeing in the context of a range of children’s life experiences related to poverty, specific risks and protective processes. It draws on a review of the literature on child-focused methods and on recent experiences piloting three core qualitative methods in the four study countries. The paper reports the development of a methodology that is child-centred, but also acknowledges that every child is embedded within a network of social and economic relationships.

The Differentiation of Social Demands in Europe. The Social Basis of the European Models of Capitalism

This paper tests the impact of various determinants of the preference for two key elements of the European social models: redistribution and trade unions, using individual data from the first round of the European Social Survey. The basic hypothesis is that the main determinant of an individual’s support for these elements of the European models is the social position of the individual in terms of income, status and risks attached to their labour market insertion. The paper also considers the relative importance of less ‘materialist’ influences such as religion or other cultural determinants. The estimations show that ‘materialist’ determinants are by far the most important influences on individual preferences, contrary to what most social theories of modernisation contend.

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Projecting Long-Term Care Expenditure in Four European Union Member States: The Influence of Demographic Scenarios

This study examines the sensitivity of future long-term care demand and expenditure estimates to official demographic projections in four selected European countries: Germany, Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom. It uses standardised methodology in the form of a macro-simulation exercise and finds evidence for significant differences in assumptions about demographic change and its effect on the demand for long-term care, and on relative and absolute long-term care expenditure. It concludes that mortality-rate assumptions can have a considerable influence on welfare policy planning. Relative dispersion between country-specific and Eurostat official estimates was found to be higher for the United Kingdom and Germany than for Italy and Spain, suggesting that demographic projections had a greater influence in those countries.

Nonmarket networks among migrants: evidence from metropolitan Bangkok,Thailand

This paper examines the nonmarket interactions among migrants in the urban labor market of Bangkok, Thailand. We test whether the population size and the labor-market performance of previous migrants have externalities to new migrants who have moved from the same province of origin. Our empirical results, which control origin fixed effects, time fixed effects, and origin- and year-specific correlated shocks, show that (1) the relative population size of previous migrants in the market decreases the employment probability of new migrants (substitution effect), (2) the employment probability of previous migrants increases that of new migrants (positive externalities), and (3) when the employment probability of previous migrants is high, however, the scale effect becomes positive, which demonstrates a threshold in the informational scale economies. The results imply that positive informational scale effect dominates negative substitution effect when the efficiency of previous migrants is sufficiently high in the destination labor market.

The influence of wages on parents’ allocations of time to child care and market work in the United Kingdom

We use time-diary data on couples with children from the 2000 United Kingdom Time Use Survey to examine the impacts of own and partner’s wages on parents’ provision of child care and market work on weekdays and on weekends and holidays. We find that increases in partners’ wages increase women’s primary care on all days and decrease their market work on weekdays, while increases in women’s own wages increase their market work on weekdays. There is little evidence that men’s time use responds to changes in their own wages. However, an increase in men’s partners’ wages increases men’s passive child-care time on weekends and reduces their market-work time on weekends.

Ageing of a giant: a stochastic population forecast for China, 2006–2060

This paper presents a stochastic population forecast for China with a special emphasis on population ageing. The so-called scaled model for error was used to quantify the uncertainty attached to the population predictions. Data scarcity was a major problem in the specification of the expected error of the population forecast. Therefore, the error structures estimated for European countries were used with some modifications, taking into account the large size and heterogeneity of the Chinese population. The stochastic forecast confirms the expectation of extremely rapid population ageing during the first half of the twenty-first century in China. The old age dependency ratio (OADR) will certainly increase. Simply maintaining the current demographic rates (no international migration) would drive the OADR to 0.42 in 2060, four times the current level. Including expected declines in mortality and net outmigration in the projection would increase the median OADR in 2060 to 0.59, with a 80% prediction interval of [0.47, 0.75]. In particular, the oldest-old population will grow much faster than any other age group. This development has major implications for policy-making in China.

The Quality of the Urban Environment Around Public Housing Buildings in Montréal: An Objective Approach Based on GIS and Multivariate Statistical Analysis

The question of the “insertion” in space of public housing into the surrounding urban environment is not new. It has often been examined from the perspective of the social environment, but more rarely from that of the physical environment and the accessibility of public and private services and facilities. To qualify the immediate urban environment around Montréal’s public housing buildings in its complexity, we are proposing a methodological approach based on the use of several spatial databases in GIS: (1) the Montréal public housing database, (2) individual census data for the Montréal CMA, (3) a satellite image, (4) a land use map, and (5) location data on a series of public and private services and facilities. Use of these spatial data enables us to identify various combinations of advantages and disadvantages within the urban living environment in which Montréal’s public housing buildings have been located, according to three dimensions: the social environment, the physical environment, and the accessibility of services and facilities. Our final results show that only a small proportion of public housing tenants (7%) live in residual spaces, that is, in quite unattractive areas of the city which combine a number of urban disadvantages: a degraded physical environment, a high level of social deprivation, and few or no services and facilities.