The Evolution of Well-Being in Spain (1980–2001): A Regional Analysis

Evaluations of regional welfare conventionally rely on Gross Value Added (GVA) per capita as an indicator of well-being. This paper attempts to re-address the regional welfare issue using alternative indicators to per capita income. With this aim, a database for the Spanish regions (NUTS II) has been constructed for the period 1980–2001 and an augmented version of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Index (HDI) has been estimated incorporating indicators of health, education and per capita income. The results show that, whereas regional income per capita disparities have remained constant, regional convergence in the Augmented Human Development Index (AHDI) was achieved between 1980 and 2001. None the less, there is no evidence of intra-distributional mobility (leap-frogging) across regions in the AHDI     

第五届亚太生殖健康大会

为推动开罗国际人口与发展大会《行动纲领》及“千年发展目标”在亚太区域如期实现,2009年10月18-20日,由中国国家人口计生委、中国计划生育协会、中国人口学会、国际计划生育联合会、联合国人口基金、人口与发展南南合作伙伴组织等共同举办的第五届亚太生殖健康大会在北京召开。     

Validity and Psychometric Properties of the Early Development Instrument in Canada,Australia, United States,and Jamaica

There is an increasing support from international organizations and the research community for stepping beyond infant or child mortality as the most common child level social indicator and progressing towards an international measure of child development. The Early Development Instrument (EDI) is a teacher-completed measure of children’s developmental health at school entry, which to date has been used in more than a dozen countries. The EDI includes five developmental domains (Physical Health and Well-being, Social Competence, Emotional Maturity, Language and Cognitive Development and Communication Skills and General Knowledge) and 16 subdomains. This paper examines the EDI’s psychometric properties in four English-speaking countries (Canada, Australia, United States and Jamaica) by evaluating both the internal consistency and factor structures, as well as exploring the association between the EDI’s Language and Cognitive Development Domain and a direct assessment of children’s receptive vocabulary (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, PPVT). Overall, the factor loadings and internal consistencies of domains and subdomains were similar across the countries. The comparisons of the Language and Cognitive Development Domain with the PPVT showed high specificity and low sensitivity. The results of this paper indicate that the EDI, a measure of children’s developmental status at school entry, demonstrates similar psychometric properties in a number of countries, thus building the evidence for the instrument to be added to the limited array of internationally comparable child social indicators.     

The Measurement of Non-economic Inequality in Well-Being Indices

This paper is a critical review of composite well-being indices that account for inequality. Many well-being indices build upon the idea that while income and wealth are important, they do not constitute a person’s actual quality of life. However, first of all, the analysis finds that while well-being indices aim to go “beyond GDP” and other primarily economic indicators, many of them, unfortunately, do not focus on inequality at all. Secondly, most indices which include inequality in their measurement, only account for economic inequality. Thirdly, the article finds that the most comprehensive wellbeing index in terms of inequality is the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index which adjusts for economic, health and education inequality. This article finds that well-being indices should make further strides to ensure the capture of non-economic inequality in terms of education and health.     

论新时期的人力资源开发与有效就业

人力资源开发是我国新时期扩大有效就业的决定性前提条件。它通过优化开发增加人力资源的有效供给,既可促进就业的持续扩大和亿万农民就业非农化的大转换,又能推动新的低劳工成本国际比较优势的形成而扩大就业,从而就可使严重的失业和潜在失业压力得到根本缓解。因此,当前我国应实行"人力资源开发第一"和开发战略重点向农民倾斜的重大战略调整,并重点突破创业能力与创业人才开发的瓶颈,多层次地增加人力资源的有效供给,以从根本上促进有效就业的扩大。     

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this articles. John F. Kantner and Andrew Kantner The Struggle for International Consensus on Population and Development World Bank World Development Report 2007: Development and the Next Generation Lyla M. Hernandez and Dan G. Blazer (eds .) Genes, Behavior, and the Social Environment: Moving Beyond the Nature/NurtureDebate. World Bank Global Economic Prospects 2007: Managing the Next Wave of Globalization Daniel Jordan Smith A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria Ian Bannon and Maria C. Correia (eds .) The Other Half of Gender: Men's Issues in Development John Broome Weighing Lives Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations The State of Food and Agriculture: Agricultural Trade and Poverty: Can Trade Work for the Poor? John Glad Future Human Evolution: Eugenics in the Twenty‐First Century United Nations Development Programme Human Development Report 2006. Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis     

特大城市如何调控人口规模?

随着城市化快速推进,我国的大城市发展迅速,特大城市①从1997年的34个增长到2007年的63个。近年来,某些特大城市显现出来的一系列交通拥堵、资源匮乏、环境污染、住房紧张、公共服务失衡等城市问题,引发了各方热议。特大城市人口规模如何调控?如何管理,越来越成为各方关注的热点和焦点。以往在优先发展大城市还是优先发展小城镇方面一直存在着分歧,对城市人     

上海重大建设对人口布局的影响及对策研究

上世纪90年代。上海市的战略地位发生巨大变化。城市功能布局由此进入大调整时期,一系列的重大建设项目由此展开并对城市人口布局产生深刻影响。上海市政府长期倡导的疏解中心城区人口的方针正在显现实效。但上海市人口优化布局的目标还远未实现,面临着众多挑战与问题。当前,科学发展现是符合时代要求的指导城市建设与规划的正确的观念。城市重大建设的具体工作必须坚持以人为本,符合科学发展观的要求。     

Multidimensional Measurement and Comparison of China’s Educational Inequality

Social Indicators Research - Educational equity significantly supports the creation of a harmonious society, which has become one of the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations for...     

Assessing the Impact of Population Dynamics on Poverty Measures: A Decomposition Analysis

Social Indicators Research - Reducing income inequality is one of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals recently announced by United Nations. A relative poverty concept adopted by...     

A Calibrated Index of Human Development

The weightings of the four component indicators of the UNDP’s Human Development Index HDI appear to be arbitrary and have not been given justification. This paper develops a variant of the HDI, calculated to reflect peoples’ revealed evaluations of education and the productivity of work. The resulting Calibrated human Development Index CDI has a simpler structure, places greater weight on life expectancy and lesser weight on education. It is validated by high correlation with life evaluations from the World Values Survey. The CDI ranks countries much like the HDI. More importantly, its provenance permits it to be used to assess specific policies, regulations, safety standards, life-saving interventions and health-care alternatives. The CDI is a unified tool for policy evaluation and decision support.     

Effect of COVID-19 on Household Food Insecurity and Poverty: Evidence from Ghana

Social Indicators Research - Following the outbreak of COVID-19 and its heavy toll on the global community and humanity, a fierce debate on the pandemic and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)...     

Designing appropriate intervention strategies for HIV/AIDS in southern Africa

This research was supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development.     

Special Program to Lift MinorityGroups out of Poverty

China is making a special Program to Support Development of Small Minority Groups (2005-2010), according to Mao Gongning, director general of policies and regulations at the National Commission for Ethnic Affairs.The plan calls for the eradication of poverty at poverty-stricken ethnic-inhabited areas in six years. Those that have met their basic needs for subsistence should be able to reach middle-income levels and others even higher levels. Of the 55 ethnic minority groups in China, acc…     

Philippines: decentralized approach shows results

In the Philippines several steps have been taken to meet the challenge of increasing population growth. Commencing with the Republic Act 6365, known as the Population Act (1971) program directives focus on achieving and maintaining population levels most conducive to the national welfare. In 1978 a Special Committee was constituted by the President to review the population program. Pursuant to the Committee's findings certain changes were adopted. The thrust is now towards longterm planning to ensure a more significant and perceptible demographic impact of development programs and policies. Increasing attention is paid to regional development and spatial distribution in the country. The 1978-82 Development Plan states more clearly the interaction between population and development. The National Economic and Development Authority, the central policy and planning agency of the government, takes charge of formulation and coordinating the broader aspects of population policy and integrating population with socioeconomic plans and policies. At present the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) is implementing a project known as the Population/Development Planning and Research (PDPR) project with financial support from the UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA). This project promotes and facilitates the integration of the population dimension in the planning process. It does this by maintaining linkages and instituting collaborative mechanisms with the different NEDA regional offices and sectoral ministries. It also trains government planners in ways of integrating population concerns into the development plan. PDPR promotes the use of population and development research for planning purposes and policy formation. The Philippine Development Plan, 1978-82, recognized that an improvement in the level of 1 sector reinforces the performance of the other sectors. Since the establishment of the National Population Program 12 years ago, population and family planning have been successfully integrated with various development sectors, notably, labor, health, and education. Through the policies of integration, multiagency participation, and partnership of the public and private sectors, the Commission on Population uses existing development programs of government and private organizations as vehicles for family planning information and services and shares the responsibility of implementing all facets of the population program with various participating agencies in the government and private sector.     

Measuring Multidimensional Poverty According to National Definitions: Operationalising Target 1.2 of the Sustainable Development Goals

Social Indicators Research - The first Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) tasks countries with eradicating poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions. This presents...     

Composite Indices of Development and Poverty: An Application to MDGs

The measurement of development or poverty as multidimensional phenomena is very difficult because there are several theoretical, methodological and empirical problems involved. The literature of composite indicators offers a wide variety of aggregation methods, all with their pros and cons. In this paper, we propose a new, alternative composite index denoted as MPI (Mazziotta-Pareto Index) which, starting from a linear aggregation, introduces penalties for the countries or geographical areas with ‘unbalanced’ values of the indicators. As an example of application of the MPI, we consider a set of indicators in order to measure the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and we present a comparison between HDI (Human Development Index) methodology, HPI (Human Poverty Index) methodology and MPI.     

The Economic Perspective of Food Poverty and (In)security: An Analytical Approach to Measuring and Estimation in Italy

Social Indicators Research - The UN Sustainable Development Goals have set clear targets on global poverty, hunger and malnutrition to be achieved by 2030, which have prompted academics and...     

Human Development Over Time: An Empirical Comparison of a Dynamic Index and the Standard HDI

Social Indicators Research - This research uses panel data to explore inferences about human development associated with two different formulations of the Human Development Index (HDI). The first...     

SHORT REVIEWS

Books reviewed in this article: Kamran Asdar Ali, Planning the Family in Egypt: New Bodies, New Selves David I. Kertzer and Dominique Arel (EDS.), Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses Peter Lloyd‐Sherlock (ED.), Healthcare Reform and Poverty in Latin America Ishwar Modi (ED.), Ageing and Human Development: Global Perspectives United Nations Development Programme, Regional Bureau for Arab States, Arab Human Development Report 2002: Creating Opportunities for Future Generations United Nations Population Division, World Population Ageing 1950–2050 Jacques Vallin, France Meslé, and Tapani Valkonen (EDS.), Trends in Mortality and Differential Mortality Myron Weiner and Michael S. Teitelbaum, Political Demography, Demographic Engineering Zhang Weiguo, Economic Reforms and Fertility Behavior: A Study of a North Chinese Village