Does Trust Mean the Same for Migrants and Natives? Testing Measurement Models of Political Trust with Multi-group Confirmatory Factor Analysis

Political trust is seen as an important attribute in contemporary representative democracy. Political trust can cause social trust, foster associational life and make the efficient implementation of policy easier. Political trust can also be seen as a measure of political integration of migrants in Europe. However, if we want to measure this, we need to know for sure that we measure the same concept in all countries and among all cultural groups under research. This paper describes and tests four (existing) models of political trust. We find that there are multiple dimensions of political trust that can be modeled in a structural equation model. Furthermore, we research the cross-cultural equivalence of this measurement model in 22 European Union countries among natives, EU-migrants and non-EU migrants in these countries. Our results indicate that we can compare levels of political trust within countries pretty well, however, we should be careful comparing levels of political trust between EU countries since full scalar equivalence could not be reached. On a substantive note, we find quite some differences between the EU countries concerning the political trust natives have and we find diverging results concerning the migrants. In most countries we did not find a significant difference between migrants and natives. However, when the difference was significant, migrants showed higher levels of political trust in most instances.     

A semigroup approach to the strong ergodic theorem of the multistate stable population process

In this paper we first formulate the dynamics of multistate stable population processes as a partial differential equation. Next, we rewrite this equation as an abstract differential equation in a Banach space, and solve it by using the theory of strongly continuous semigroups of bounded linear operators. Subsequently, we investigate the asymptotic behavior of this semigroup to show the strong ergodic theorem which states that there exists a stable distribution independent of the initial distribution. Finally, we introduce the dual problem in order to obtain a logical definition for the reproductive value and we discuss its applications.     

重庆市居民生育意愿调查分析

本文通过问卷调查对重庆市居民的生育意愿进行了定量分析,对不同特征人群的生育意愿,包括理想生育子女数量、子女性别偏好、理想最佳生育年龄和生育目的四个维度进行了比较研究。文章在分析重庆市居民生育意愿的现状及其影响因素的基础上,提出了倡导正确生育观及促进人口发展的政策建议。     

A semigroup approach to the strong ergodic theorem of the multistate stable population process

"In this paper we first formulate the dynamics of multistate stable population processes as a partial differential equation. Next, we rewrite this equation as an abstract differential equation in a Banach space, and solve it by using the theory of strongly continuous semigroups of bounded linear operators. Subsequently, we investigate the asymptotic behavior of this semigroup to show the strong ergodic theorem which states that there exists a stable distribution independent of the initial distribution. Finally, we introduce the dual problem in order to obtain a logical definition for the reproductive value and we discuss its applications." (SUMMARY IN FRE)     

Metabolism and Driving Forces of Chinese Urban Household Consumption

This study was aimed at developing a better understanding of environmental pressure of urban household consumption in China. First, we introduced the concept model of household metabolism. Using this model, we analyzed the changes of Chinese household metabolism during the last 20 years. Rather than taking into account all aspects of household consumption, we just focused on water and energy metabolisms. After exploring the clearly increasing trends of urban household metabolism in China, we identified the underlying driving forces as biological/physical factors, economic/marketing factors and demographic factors. In conclusion, we suggest that additional work must be carried out in a wider range of household activities and at more advanced research levels in China.     

甘肃省人口与计划生育工作的形势与任务

本文对甘肃省2001年人口与计划生育工作进行了系统总结,分析了甘肃人口与计划生育工作面临的形势,提出了2002年的工作目标和重点。     

Distribution of Household Income in America: Effects of Source of Income,Inflation, and Cost of Living Differentials

This study focuses on four aspects of theinequality of average household income amongthe American states. First, we document changein the inequality of nominal average householdincome between 1979 and 1990. Second, weidentify states contributing to the observedinequality. Third, we examine the pattern instate income convergence-divergence whenspatial and temporal state price differentialsare accounted for. Fourth, we provide estimatesof impacts of alternative income components onincome inequality. We find that inequality inreal income is smaller than that in nominalincome. Also, we conclude that traditionalincome measures that exclude transfer paymentsand other types of income overstateinequality.     

‘Walking out’: the mobilities of love

ABSTRACT

In this article, I propose that mobility performs a crucial role in the production and sustenance of intimate relationships and focus, in particular, on courtship practices and their modern-day equivalents. I pursue this discussion through close readings of literary and autobiographical texts from the nineteenth century through to the millennium, and by means of a framework that triangulates the work of Tim Ingold, David Seamon and Henri Bergson. My focus here is on how the mobilities we practice during the everyday routines of courtship – i.e. the paths we make, the routes we take, the roads we travel, the journeys we repeat, the transport we use – come to characterise the relationship concerned and impact upon its progress. Both Ingold’s work on ‘lines’ and Seamon’s on ‘place-ballet’ are conceptually suggestive in this regard and speak to recent work in mobilities/cultural geography on the significance of patterns of movement in the praxis of relationships.     

Life Expectancy as an Objective Factor of a Subjective Well-Being

The paper has two parts. In the first part we offer a definition of well-being which makes life expectancy an explicit variable. We recognize the importance of happiness as a significant aspect of any definition of well-being, but we side-step the issue of what determines its level or how to measure it, and concentrate instead on the consequences of our new variable, life expectancy. We argue that life is valued for its quality, and, if positive, its extension is an improvement of well-being. From this we show how, given certain assumptions, disparate problems that have moral and/or social significance can be approached from the perspective of improving well-being. We close the first part by showing that our definition has enough flexibility to be used for that class of decisions which require tradeoffs between quality of life (happiness) and life expectancy. As a corollary we show that attitudes toward risk depend on expectations, and on some occasions, age itself. In the second part we argue, first, that real economic factors, not reducible to mere psychological ones, may still offer an adequate explanation for the fact that absolute income and happiness do not always correlate well. However, we take no position on the many controversies, such as whether it is relative or absolute increases in wealth that bears most directly on changes in happiness. We confirm through statistical analysis (simple regressions) the well established influence that absolute income has on life expectancy, and, hence, by inference and definition, we argue that this must also be the case with well-being. Secondly, we find through statistical analysis that healthcare has as much impact on life expectancy as does absolute income, leading us to theoretically examine the appropriate income cost for access to healthcare if life expectancy is to improve. And thirdly, by assuming a homogeneous function of life expectancy, we theoretically show how a market oriented healthcare system can exacerbate inequities in life expectancy, and so on well-being. Lastly, we consider some policy implications of those inequities.     

Wilderness,a probe into "cultural carrying capacity"

Population policy for human beings must be governed by a commitment never to transcend the cultural carrying capacity. Determining this capacity is a problem in values. As concerns material goods, the cultural carrying capacity is inversely proportional to the quality of life demanded. Inherently scarce goods like wilderness, which can be enjoyed by only a few, pose this ethical problem: can we agree on a basis for choosing an elite, or must we, like the French revolutionary Gracchus Babeuf, insist on equal distribution even if the only possible allotment is then zero? If we reject Babeuf we must recognize that the maximum population cannot be the optimum.     

农民知识化的条件创设和路径选择

知识经济迫切呼唤农民的知识化。只有自觉主动积极创设相应的物质、精神、政治条件 ,才能从宏观环境上保障农民的知识化。只有建构社会化的开放的多样的农民终身教育体系 ,从体制和机制的结合上构建可操作的相关政策法规体系 ,才能从微观上创设农民知识化的条件     

Predictability,complexity, and catastrophe in a collapsible model of population,development, and environmental interactions

"More and more population forecasts are being produced with associated 95 percent confidence intervals. How confident are we of those confidence intervals? In this paper, we produce a simulated dataset in which we know both past and future population sizes, and the true 95 percent confidence intervals at various future dates. We use the past data to produce population forecasts and estimated 95 percent confidence intervals using various functional forms. We, then, compare the true 95 percent confidence intervals with the estimated ones. This comparison shows that we are not at all confident of the estimated 95 percent confidence intervals." (SUMMARY IN FRE)     

上海浦东城乡社会养老保障体系的一体化思考——阶梯式社会养老保障体系

经过十多年的改革与尝试 ,浦东新区城乡已基本上形成了一套符合其实际 ,具有特色的养老保障体系。随着新区的农村“城市化”、农民“市民化”的推进 ,如何尽快地并轨城市养老保障与农村养老保障 ,已成为政府职能部门需要抓紧研究解决的问题。城乡一体化的社会养老保障模式是浦东新区城市化和社会经济发展的客观要求 ,现行养老保障模式无法缩小城乡差距 ,因此 ,必须建立一个由农村养老保障向城市养老保障过渡的并具有可操作的平台 ,形成城乡阶梯式社会养老保障体系。     

The mother of battles: Confronting the implications of automobile dependence in the United States

Since the turn of the century, the pace of U.S. society has become synchronized with the rate at which we consume fossil fuels, which has anchored the automobile as a focal point in daily life. The automobile allows most of us to live where we live, work where we work, enjoy ourselves where and when we enjoy ourselves, and to connect the many different, distant dimensions of our daily lives. However, the invention which was once synonymous with boundless opportunity is already engaged in a cycle of limitation. With this cycle we are equally synchronized, as our society becomes increasingly dependent on the automobile. Of this process most Americans have, at best, a fragmented understanding. In refusing to recognize the malignant effects of our automobile dependence, which requires a straightforward acceptance and direct treatment, we allow its ill-effects to grow beyond control. Each day that our automobile dependence grows, our capacity to affect the character of this change slips a notch. The objective of this paper is to characterize the true cost of automobile dependence on our society, not in a dollar estimate, but in human terms.     

Mixed estimation of old-age mortality

"Section 2 will first extend the method of mixed estimation to maximum likelihood estimation in general. Then, we will review generalized linear models with logistic and Poisson regressions as examples. In Section 3 we discuss different approaches for formulating the auxiliary information in practice. Section 4 first reviews the method of Coale and Kisker, provides empirical estimates for it, and then proceeds with the mixed estimation variant. In Section 5 we apply the methods to the estimation of mortality at ages 80+ in Finland in 1980-1993. We will first consider the evidence for mortality crossover between males and females....Then we will estimate life expectancies at age 100." (EXCERPT)     

Does Education Affect Happiness? Evidence for Spain

In this paper we study the impact of education on happiness in Spain using individual-level data from the European Social Survey, by means of estimating Ordinal Logit Models. We find both direct and indirect effects of education on happiness. First, we find an indirect effect of education on happiness through income and labour status. That is, we find that people with a higher education level have higher income levels and a higher probability of being employed, and thus, report higher levels of happiness. Second, and after controlling by income, labour status and other socio-economic variables, we find that education has a positive (and direct) impact on happiness. We interpret this result as evidence of a ??self-confidence?? or ??self-estimation?? effect from acquiring knowledge. Finally, we find that the direct impact of education on happiness does not depend of the level of education (primary, secondary or tertiary).     

Labor-Force Participation Rates and the Informational Value of Unemployment Rates in US: Evidence from Regional Data

Unemployment rate is an important social indicator for unhappiness. This paper explores the informational value of the United States unemployment rate via examining whether the labor-force participation rate is featured with non-stationary processes from the geographical location perspective. We apply the recently developed flexible Fourier stationarity test proposed by Enders and Lee (Oxf Bull Econ Stat 74:574–599 2012). Our main findings are: (1) when we apply conventional tests, such as the Augmented Dickey–Fuller (ADF), ADF-GLS and KPSS univariate tests, we find little evidence for stationarity; and (2) when we employ the flexible Fourier univariate test with consider of structural breaks, we find evidence of stationarity for 45 out of 51 states. Based on our results, we argue that the unemployment rate alone, without understanding participation behavior, does not provide an overall picture for the melancholy jobless people.     

对"溺婴"的人口社会学分析

文章通过对溺婴行为的界定分析了溺婴的原因及产生的社会后果,并对如何抑制这种现象作了进一步的探讨。     

关于新时期避孕药具管理指标体系的探讨

本文从计生优质服务的角度出发,指出现有避孕药具管理指标存在的主要问题是重视生育控制,而忽视妇女生殖健康与满意程度。对此,作者提出了与新时期计生优质服务相配套,以人的全面发展为目的的避孕药具管理指标新体系。同时指出,新的指标体系的实施必须因地制宜,逐步推行。     

Fifty Years After the Social Indicators Movement: Has the Promise Been Fulfilled?

In spite of its currency both in academic research and political rhetoric, there are numerous attempts to define and conceptualize the social cohesion concept but there has been paid little attention to provide a rigorous and empirically tested definition. There are even fewer studies that address social cohesion in a framework of cross-cultural validation of the indicators testing the equivalence of the factorial structure across countries. Finally, as far as we know there is no study that attempt to provide an empirically tested multilevel definition of social cohesion specifying a Multilevel Structural Equation Model. This study aims to cover this gap. First, we provide a theoretical construct of social cohesion taking into account not only its multidimensionality but also its multilevel structure. In the second step, to test the validity of this theoretical construct, we perform a multilevel confirmatory factor analysis in order to verify if the conceptual structure suggested in first step holds. In addition, we test the cross-level structural equivalence and the measurement invariance of the model in order to verify if the same multilevel model of social cohesion holds across the 29 countries analysed. In the final step, we specify a second-order multilevel CFA model in order to identify the existence of a general factor that can be called “social cohesion” operating in society that accounts for the surface phenomena that we observe.