Spatial differences in fertility decline in Kenya: evidence from recent fertility surveys

Province level fertility and socioeconomic development indicators from the 1989 and 1993 Kenya Demographic and Health Surveys (KDHS) document the spatial pattern of Kenya’s recent fertility decline. Although the data suggest that substantial regional variations in fertility reduction exist, fertility reduction has been pervasive throughout the 1989–1993 period. More specifically, the 1989 and 1993 KDHS data indicate that low fertility levels characterize the Nairobi–Central Province core while high fertility levels characterize Coast, Rift Valley and Western Province. However, Western Province has experienced the greatest percentage reduction in fertility throughout the period suggesting that the regional gaps in fertility decline are closing. Persistent fertility decline has also occurred in rural and urban areas, and fertility limitation is supported by Kenyan males. Factors impacting continued fertility reduction efforts are identified.     

Partisan Gerrymandering and the Voting Rights Act*

Objective. The goal of the study is to empirically assess the extent of partisan and incumbent gerrymandering in the 2000 congressional redistricting. Critics of congressional redistricting have argued that recent partisan gerrymandering severely undermines electoral competitiveness to the point of violating constitutional equal protection standards. Method. We first analyze the legal precedents and arguments central to the contemporary redistricting debate. We then analyze district‐level data measuring the change in a congressional incumbent's presidential party vote share before and after the 2000 redistricting. We conduct regression analyses that test for partisan and incumbent gerrymandering effects with an eye toward noting implications for the Voting Rights Act, particularly majority‐minority districting. Results. We find that recent redistricting significantly contributed to a further decline in electoral competitiveness; however, most of this decline in competitiveness came through incumbency protection, not partisan gerrymandering. Majority‐minority districts lost about 5 percent incumbent party vote share, though only 3 percent in southern states. Conclusion. Given these results, we conclude that the logic of partisan gerrymandering is at variance with the mandate of racial redistricting. One effect of establishing a strict judicial standard limiting statewide partisan biases would be to restrict states' capacity to draw majority‐minority districts.     

Can increased educational attainment explain declining Indigenous fertility?

Prior research shows that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are more likely to have children and have more children, on average, than non-Indigenous women. However, like those of the total Australian population, fertility rates of Indigenous women have been declining since the 1970s. The decline has been more significant in recent years. Between 2006 and 2016, an increasing proportion of Indigenous women postponed childbirth from their teens into their 20s and 30s, leading women to have fewer children over their lifetimes. During the same period, there was a rapid increase in educational attainment among the Indigenous population. This paper examines educational gradients in fertility among Indigenous women and whether the observed fertility decline is linked with the increased educational attainment. Using data from the 2006, 2011 and 2016 Australian Census of Population and Housing and applying a shift-share decomposition analysis, we find that education has been a big driver of falling fertility rates in non-remote areas. In remote areas, education has had a much smaller effect (except for youngest women).     

The effects of Mexico's devaluations and tariff changes on U.S. exports

The recent economic crisis in Mexico has been accompanied by several devaluations of the peso and a change in Mexico's tariff schedule. With Mexico being the third largest trading partner of the U.S. any serious disruption of this trade flow could significantly affect U.S. exports. This article presents estimates of the decline in U.S. exports in total and by industry. In total, the decline amounts to approximately $4.5 billion or a reduction in U.S. exports to Mexico of 31 percent. In addition, it is shown that approximately 40 percent of this total reduction in U.S. exports occurs in 15 product categories with 4 product categories accounting for about one-fifth of the total reduction. As is evident, only a few industries will bear a large percentage of the decline in U.S. exports to Mexico.     

China's Pro-Poor Growth: Measurement and Implications

ABSTRACT. Pro-poor growth has been the preeminent strategic framework of the international development community because it describes relationships between growth, inequality, and poverty. Assessing whether economic growth and income distributional changes are “pro-poor” has important policy implications and has become increasingly widespread in academic and policy societies. The article aims to measure the pro-poor growth in rural China from 1989 to 2009 through analyzing the household survey data collected by the China Health and Nutrition Survey. Among the main findings, from 1989 to 2006, China's economic growth in rural areas was relatively weakly pro-poor and poverty reduction mainly relied on the “trickle-down effect” of economic growth. However, since 2006, both the “trickle-down effect” of growth and changes in income distribution have reduced poverty. During this period, Chinese economic growth was pro-poor. Research on pro-poor growth based on more comprehensive data is urgently needed to advise policymakers to make relevant policies.     

Estimates of fertility in Bangladesh

The attempt is made to estimate fertility levels in Bangladesh on the basis of data collected during the 1974 Census. In the 1st section attention is directed to providing an overall picture of the demographic situation in the country. Comparisons between the 1961 and 1974 data demonstrates that the 1974 Census data provide consistent results. Factors such as the degree of urbanization, literacy and economic participation rates--considered as indicators of development--all seem to show little progress during the intercensal period. The use of child/women ratios (CWRs) provides plausible evidence of the likelihood of a fertility decline. A decline in CWR values is small for "all areas" but a marked decline can be noted for "urban areas." The recorded mean number of children is less in 1974 than in 1961 for women under age 35 whereas for the older groups the 1974 Census shows higher mean numbers. The Bangladesh Fertility Survey (BFS) data result for the total fertility rate of 6.58 is very close to that estimated for the 1974 Census--6.59. The reverse survival method also indicates that birthrates have been lower during the 1969-1974 period.     

Listen to What I Say,Not How I Vote: Congressional Support for the President in Washington and at Home*

Objectives. Are legislators' party affiliations or is district partisanship the greatest predictor of legislative support of the president? Do members of the U.S. House emphasize different policy positions when casting roll calls than when communicating their positions to constituents? We theorize that party is less important in legislators' district‐oriented behavior than in roll‐call voting. When casting roll calls, legislators are agents facing multiple principals, namely, political party leaders and their district constituencies. When engaging in district‐oriented behavior, the only key principal is the legislator's constituency. Methods. We analyze legislators' positions on roll calls and in platforms. Platforms are examined with a unique data set of franked mass mailings sent by House members. Linear and limited dependent variable models are employed. Results. Our findings show that constituency preferences are a more consistent predictor of legislative support for the president when analyzing legislators' platforms, and that political party has a relatively limited effect. When analyzing roll‐call votes, party is the key predictor. Conclusions. Political parties may be interested in what legislators do as opposed to what they say. The platform findings are in contrast to most recent empirical work examining position taking, though consistent with the canonical works of Mayhew and Fenno. This has implications for theories of parties in Congress that tie party behavior in the legislature to partisanship in the electorate.     

Victorian values and the fertility decline: the case of Scotland

The author examines the final phase of the demographic transition in Scotland during the late nineteenth century. Particular attention is given to explanations developed by Joseph Banks concerning the fertility decline in England and Wales. Banks's analysis is reevaluated by applying it to data for Scotland. No clear pattern of fertility by occupation is found. It is suggested instead that both family size limitation and emphasis on higher education were results of value reorientations.     

From the suburbs to the house: The metropolitan–rural population and the success of women candidates

We analyze the voting behavior of metropolitan and rural residents in relation to women's legislative representation. Examining election data on the U.S. House and all lower state houses, we find that the greater the metropolitan population in a legislative district, the more likely it is to be represented by a woman. We extrapolate from these findings that the modern increase in women's representation can be attributed in part to the rural-to-suburban shift in population and legislative seats.     

Projecting Australia's Fertility—Postscript

An accelerated decline in family size has led to a downward revision of projected fertility. Replacement fertility could be reached in the 1980s with births numbering about 250,000 a year. The population is approaching stability at the younger ages. The potential for poverty arising from large families may be halved in ten years.     

Knowledge,power and the city since 1700

Between the mid-nineteenth century and the early twentieth century the trend of recorded violence in New Zealand broadly paralleled that of Britain. This review appraises critically two local interpretations of social attitudes and behaviour seen to be reflected in the colonial trend. Both provide 'frontier-type' theses in viewing disorder as a by-product of either colonial masculinity or the social atomization of migrants. Accordingly the decline in recorded violence is viewed as the outcome of either a local civilizing process or the emergence of social networks. However, the parallelism of the colonial and British trends suggest that there could be common processes at work. In this context, the nature of colonial violence, patterns of colonial litigiousness and the applicability of V. A. C. Gatrell's interpretation of the development of a disciplinary 'policeman-state' are considered. The need for further comparative research in both the colonial and British context is suggested, so as to test the extent to which the colonial experience of violence may be explained by 'frontier' and/or 'cultural fragment' explanations.     

Projecting Australia's Fertility

A method has been evolved for projecting Australia's fertility which takes into account changes in family size. Total fertility is expected to fall by about 2 per cent a year. The total number of births is likely to increase to about 285,000 in 1981 and remain at that level to the end of the century.     

Food and Conflict in Europe in the Age of the Two World Wars

John Walter and Roger Schofield (eds), Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society (1989), xiv + 335(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £35.00).

Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town 1660–1770 (1989), xxii + 416 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, £37.50).

William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (1989), xi + 466, (Clarendon Press, Oxford, £17.50).

E. A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (1988), vii + 146 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £17.50).

Pat Hudson, Regions and Industries: A Perspective on the Industrial Revolution in Britain (1989), xiii + 277 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £30.00).

Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments. The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid‐Victorian England (1989), xi + 282 (Virago Press, £12.99).

Gerald D. Surh, 1905 in St Petersburg: Labor, Society and Revolution (1989), xvii + 456 (Stanford University Press, Stanford, $45.00).

Geoffrey Swain

Bristol Polytechnic

Avner Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (1989), xx + 449 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, £25.00).

Arthur Marwick (ed.), Total War and Social Change (1988), 160 (Macmillan, £29.50, paperback £8.95).

Vladimir Andrle, Workers in Stalin's Russia: Industrialization and Social Change in a Planned Economy (1988), xii + 243 (Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, £40.00).

Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin's Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928–1932 (1988), xviii + 364 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £27.50).

Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941 (1988), xv + 325 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £25.00).

Peter Duus (ed.), The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume 6: The Twentieth Century (1988) xviii + 866 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £60.00).

Morag Shiach, Discourse on Popular Culture (1989), viii + 238 (Polity Press, Cambridge, £25.00).     

Determinants of social assistance caseloads for employable single adults without dependants in Canada

Government officials like the idea of just a small number of households in their respective jurisdiction receiving social assistance. A large number is seen as costly to the public treasury, and declining caseloads are generally viewed as a mark of success for both the economy and the government of the day. But what factors account for the size of a Canadian province's social assistance caseload? This article aims to shed light on this question, with a focus on single adults without dependants (and without serious disabilities) during the 1989–2017 period. One important finding is that when the value of social assistance benefit levels for this group increases by 1% in a province, the social assistance caseload for this demographic rises by 0.457%. Put differently, there is indeed an important behavior response associated with higher benefit levels. In response, we propose that provincial officials budget for higher take up levels when they increase benefit levels for this household group.     

试析学区房的形成及其社会效应——以天津市为例

在教育成为居住的配套设施和基础教育资源分布不均衡的情况下,中国政府颁布了＂就近入学＂的教育政策,重点校就学范围内的房屋便成了学区房。学区房是教育政策、教育需求者、教育配置、市场等多种力量共同作用形成的一种社会空间,呈片状分散于城市中,其中居住的大多是以孩子就学为目的的家庭。学区房与教育资源配置密切相关,它的出现加剧了教育资源分配不平等,引起＂人户分离＂,同时也缓解了老城社区衰落。     

Do we need a theory of demographic transition?

The process of transition in which a population's rate of natural increase changes from low to high to low is familiar yet a widely accepted theory has not been produced. This paper shows that the search for a general transition theory is ill-advised. This theory would contain laws that can be used: 1) in explaining changes in population growth rates in today's slow-growing populations, 2) in predictions of current and future changes in today's rapidly-growing populations, and 3) in formulating population control policies where fertility levels are high. The search for a general theory which can explain, predict, and control demographic transition is premised on the assumption that 1 entity, called demographic transition, is the object of these 3 uses. The attempt to encompass these 3 uses by a single theory has made each more difficult than it might otherwise be and has contributed to a serious schism within population studies between medical and behavioral approaches. Some ways in which future work on demographic transition can be made more productive are: 1) the formulation of population control policies for less developed countries, the prediction of population changes in those countries, and the explanation of historical trends, which are better treated as separate tasks; 2) elements of medical and behavioral approaches require reintegration; 3) mortality decline appears to be only a highly indirect source of fertility decline; 4) neither development, modernization, nor urbanization appear to be theoretically significant sources of fertility decline; and 5) neither crude birthrates nor fertility levels appear to be theoretically significant dependent variables.     

Separate Schools: Gender,Policy, and Practice in Postwar Soviet Education

Christopher F. Black, Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century (1989), xiv + 321 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £35.00).

Ralph Houlbrooke, English Family Life, 1576–1716: An Anthology from Diaries (1988), xiv + 268 (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, £14.95).

Judith Moore, A Zeal for Responsibility: The Struggle for Professional Nursing in Victorian England, 1868–1883 (1988), xvii + 214 (University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia, $23.00).

Dieter Fricke, Handbuch zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 1869 bis 1917 (1987), 2 vols, 1468 (Dietz Verlag Berlin, East Berlin, DM 58). [Handbook for the History of the German Labour Movement, 1869–1917].

Diane Langmore, Missionary Lives. Papua, 1874–1914 (1989), xxiv + 408 (University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, $28.00).

Christine Collette, For Labour and For Women: The Women's Labour League, 1906–1918 (1989), iii + 225 (Manchester University Press, Manchester, £29.95).

Sebastian Balfour, Dictatorship, Workers, and the City. Labour in Greater Barcelona since 1939 (1989), viii + 288 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, £30.00).     

The Partisan Impact of Congressional Redistricting: The Case of Texas, 2001–2003*

Objective. In this article we assess the partisan effects of five plans proposed by Republican state legislators during Texas' 2003 congressional redistricting. Methods. Using the JudgeIt statistical program developed by Gelman and King (2001) , and data provided by the Texas Legislative Council, we assess the bias, responsiveness, and the probability that the Democratic Party wins each district for each plan. Results. All five Republican plans, including the one enacted, are strongly biased in favor of the Republican Party. Conclusions. Texas' Democratic legislators were wise to use every parliamentary maneuver available to block the enactment of a new congressional map. Beyond affecting the partisan makeup of the Texas delegation, Texas' redistricting has national implications because it adds to the GOP's narrow majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.     

Between Two Motherlands: Nationality and Emigration among the Greeks of Bulgaria, 1900–1949

Nicholas Rogers, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (1989), xii + 440 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, £40.00).

Frank O'Gorman, Voters, Patrons, and Parties: The Unreformed Electorate of Hanoverian England, 1734–1832 (1989) xiv + 445 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, £40.00).     

Evaluation of Fertility Levels and Adjustment of Fertility Policy: Based on the Current Situation of the Chinese Mainland’s Provincial Fertility Levels

During the 11^th Five-year Plan (2006-2010), the total fertility rate of the mainland of China was 1.481 and was stable with a slight decline, exhibiting a spatial pattern of moderately low fertility in the central and western regions, very low fertility in the east and extremely low fertility in the northeast. Except for a rebound in a few provinces and regions with extremely low fertility rates, the ratio of actual fertility rates to policy fertility rates is still falling. The reduced fertility rate is mainly driven by development, notably the proportion of the total population represented by the exuberantly fertile women of child-bearing age and their greater urbanization, growing level of non-agricultural employment and outflow from rural areas, as well as the assimilative effect of urban production, lifestyles and cultural concepts upon the agricultural population. Development has catalyzed an irreversible trend of declining fertility; existing fertility policy has proven insufficient to keep fertility rates stable at reasonably low levels. Policy-based rebounds may emerge in urban areas and the east and northeast, where family planning policy has been better implemented; on the other hand, a non-policy-based rebound may have been released. In the central and western rural areas, multiple births occur on average among only 4.12 percent of the younger generation of women. As fertility policy is adjusted and improved, fertility rebounds in transitional fertility policy adjustment can be effectively regulated through a gradual strategy which will not provoke a sharp rebound. The time is ripe for China to conduct a nationally unified adjustment of the existing fertility policy.