Post-war refugees in Great Britain

Between 200,000 and 300,000 refugees have been admitted to the United Kingdom under various schemes since the end of the Second World War, and their absorption into the British economy has been quite satisfactory, their establishment being facilitated by an initial period of practically full employment, and their determination to become self-supporting. They have, however, failed to settle down and to develop the necessary sense of security.

Three years of directed labour, the continuing preferential treatment of British workers in respect of promotion and placement in skilled jobs, and the provision that foreign workers have to be dismissed first in case of redundancy of labour, have kept awake the “refugee complex” and have promoted the wish to emigrate further to the New World, where the refugees hope to find complete equality and freedom.

The acute housing shortage has added to the difficulties of settling down, especially in the southern regions of England, where up to the present time it has been impossible to close the Polish Family Hostels and the workers' hostels which had been established in 1946 and 1948 as a temporary measure to house the refugees when they were admitted to this country in larger numbers.

Unpreparedness of the British population and of the refugees through insufficient information about the policy underlying their admission, difference of language, habits and temperament, coupled with the isolation of the refugees in the hostels, has made mutual understanding and appreciation almost impossible and although conditions are gradually improving, the gap is being bridged only slowly after so many years of misunderstanding and apprehension, and it will probably be closed only by the next generation growing up together in England.     

Second-Generation Outcomes of the Great Migration

The mass migration of African Americans out of the South during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century represents one of the most significant internal migration flows in U.S. history. Those undertaking the Great Migration left the South in search of a better life, and their move transformed the cultural, social, and political dynamics of African American life specifically and U.S. society more generally. Recent research offers conflicting evidence regarding the migrants’ success in translating their geographic mobility into economic mobility. Due in part to the lack of a large body of longitudinal data, almost all studies of the Great Migration have focused on the migrants themselves, usually over short periods of their working lives. Using longitudinally linked census data, we take a broader view, investigating the long-term economic and social effects of the Great Migration on the migrants’ children. Our results reveal modest but statistically significant advantages in education, income, and poverty status for the African American children of the Great Migration relative to the children of southerners who remained in the South. In contrast, second-generation white migrants experienced few benefits from migrating relative to southern or northern stayers.     

Family allowances statistics in Great Britain

The Family Allowances Scheme In Great Britain covers all families with more than one child and Is the only current source of statistics giving the dates of birth of each child in the family. The main deficiencies of these statistics from the point of view of demographic analysis are the exclusion from the family of children who have left school or apprenticeship or who are over age 18, and the absence of any particulars about the parents, e.g. the mother's age or date of marriage. Comparison of the dates available, however, with the total numbers of children In the population throws some light on recent changes In family composition in Great Britain.     

Cohort size and earnings in Great Britain

Numerous studies in the United States have confirmed that individuals born into large cohorts, ceteris paribus, tend to have lower earnings on entry into the labour force compared to individuals born into small cohorts. On the other hand, only limited attention has been directed towards exploring the relationship between cohort size and earnings in other nations. This paper examines empirically the relationship between cohort size and male earnings in Great Britain. The data used is a time-series of cross-sections (1973–1982) constructed from theGeneral Household Survey. Some support for the hypothesis that large cohorts have depressed earnings is found. However, this effect does not persist as the cohort ages.     

Health of Chinese Students A Great Concern

Despite improving health conditions of Chinesestudents aged 7-22 on the whole in recent years,some problems still exist. These include increasingobesity, a high rate of nearsightedness, weakeningphysical and vital capacities and a low level of healthcare for rural students. These are the results released     

人口质量与西部大开发

本文从宣传倡导避免近邻婚配为话题,简述了更新生育观念、扩大通婚圈、走出婚育生活误区,降低出生缺陷率,提高西部地区人口质量,促进西部大开发的重要作用。     

Community Amenity Measurement for the Great Fly-Over Zones

The purpose of this paper is to provide an alternative operationalization of amenities that does not privilege certain kinds of natural resources and climatic conditions and that can be used for assessing the quality of life in small towns. The amenity inventory presented here extends previous literature by including a broad range of amenities (natural resource, indoor and outdoor built recreational facilities, public and private services, and downtown amenities). The community level of analysis and small town focus are also unique. The inventory uses both secondary data from public sources and primary data that can be gathered by researchers or community residents. Therefore, in addition to the scholarly contribution of the inventory, the process of defining and assessing community amenities may be a valuable tool for building interpersonal relationships within communities, generating community spirit, and developing strategies for enhancing the local quality of life.     

Income-tax allowances and the family in Great Britain

Income-tax allowances for dependants in Great Britain give financial aid to family-supporting taxpayers which is similar in nature to cash payments received from the State under the family allowances programme. In effect, by differentiating between single and family-supporting taxpayers, the State is sharing the financial burden of caring for each taxpayer's family. In this article an estimate is made of the total cost of such dependants' allowances to the State in the form of lost tax revenues. Analysing the cost of income-tax allowances by income group and family size, the author attempts to point out certain inequities in the State's programme which is aimed at partially alleviating the relatively unfavourable position of the family-supporting taxpayer.     

Walt Whitman,Our Great Gay Poet?

ABSTRACT

This article surveys the critical debates around Walt Whitman's “Calamus” cluster, arguing that a “queer” reading of Whitman—one that does not see him as, for example, a closeted homosexual who censored his work for fear of being “outed”—is both historically accurate and politically efficacious. While previous efforts to reclaim Whitman as “our great gay poet” are understandable—particularly given critical readings of Whitman that denied the homoeroticism of his poems—today, a reading of Whitman as homosexual threatens to simplify our understanding of the history of homosexuality and to blunt the power of Whitman's poetry to continue to “queer” normative understandings of sex and gender identity categories and their relationship to politics.     

Great Expectations: The Unintended Consequences of Educational Choices

Human capital is invariably found to be an important explanatory variable of various proxies for well being (WB), i.e. income, happiness, job and life satisfaction, and health status. Nevertheless, to date few systematic efforts have been made to explain its various interconnected functions. The U-shaped age-SWB relation found in many empirical studies suggests that investigating the pattern of different measures of WB over people’s life cycles may reveal important information and provide useful insights into the principal mechanisms that connect human capital and WB. In this paper, I explore data drawn from the Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) conducted by the Bank of Italy, which is a rich source of information on people’s socioeconomic and educational backgrounds, educational and skill mismatches in the workplace, and various measures of WB such as income, happiness, job satisfaction, and health status. I adopt a novel approach based on the idea that one should look at the overall contribution of education to well being within people’s life-cycles. The tentative explanations of my empirical findings are: (a) more educated people and people with vocational educations experience wide mismatches in their aspirations and expectations early in their adult lives; (b) these mismatches are largely confined to the labour market; and (c) the curvature of the U-shaped age-happiness relationship depends on the level and type of education. The suggested interpretation of these results is that education affects both people’s expectations and the way they react to unfulfilled aspirations.     

On the Survival of Great Apes and Their Habitat

The nonhuman Great Apes—gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos, and orangutans—are the primates genetically closest to humans, fellow members of the hominid family (hominidae). They share more than 96 percent of human DNA (more than 98 percent for chimpanzees). That relatedness, along with many similarities on such dimensions as intelligence, self‐awareness, social organization, and behavior, has argued for according them a special status among nonhuman animals—even, in the view of some ethicists, for placing them in the same moral community as humans. (One statement of this position, the Declaration on Great Apes, calls for “the extension of the community of equals to include all great apes: human beings, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orang‐utans”—at a minimum with protection of life and liberty and prohibition of deliberate infliction of pain. See « http://www.greatapeproject.org » and « http://www.personhood.org/main/org.html .») Advocates for this status point out that past exclusions of particular human groups from moral consider ability were based on what now are seen as wholly invidious arguments. Extinction would render such debate futile. All great ape populations except humans are in steep decline as a result of loss and fragmentation of their natural habitat (tropical rainforests in Central Africa and Southeast Asia) and in some regions armed poaching and hunting for bushmeat. Bonobos (DR Congo), mountain gorillas (areas bordering Rwanda, Uganda, and DR Congo), and orangutans (Sumatra and Borneo) are especially endangered. Since 2001 conservation efforts have been coordinated by the Great Ape Survival Project (GRASP), which brings together representatives of the 23 countries with great ape populations, the UN Environment Programme, and some NGOs. The first ministerial meeting of GRASP was held in Kinshasa in September 2005. It issued the Kinshasa Declaration on Great Apes. A more operational document that also emerged from Kinshasa was the Global Strategy for the Survival of Great Apes and Their Habitat. An annex to this document, providing information on the present status of great ape populations, is reproduced in part below. (The omitted section describes the conservation activities of various UN bodies.) The Kinshasa meeting materials can be found at « http://www.unep.org/grasp/Meetings/IGMkinshasa/Outcomes/index‐reports.asp ».     

Life Expectancy during the Great Depression in Eleven European Countries

The recent global economic recession has renewed interest in knowing whether a declining economy affects population health. Understanding the extreme case of the Great Depression may inform the current debate as well as theory regarding biological and behavioral adaptations to unwanted economic change. We test the hypothesis, recently suggested in the literature, that period life expectancy at birth improved during the Great Depression. We applied time‐series methods to annual period life expectancy data of the civilian population from eleven European countries. Methods control for trends and other forms of autocorrelation in life expectancy that could induce spurious associations. We cannot reject the null hypothesis that period life expectancy at birth during the Great Depression remained within the interval forecasted from historical values. Additional analyses using an automated, rule‐based methodology also cannot reject the null hypothesis. During the most severe phase of the Great Depression, period life expectancy in eleven European countries generally did not rise above expected levels.     

Fertility trends,excess mortality,and the Great Irish Famine

This paper has developed estimates of the age-specific mortality rates prevailing during the Great Irish Famine and has analyzed fertility trends during the 25 years before the Famine. Our calculations confirm that 1 million Irish people perished as a result of this disaster. This figure does not include the deaths among the 1.3 million emigrants who left Ireland during the Famine period. The Famine produced a significant drop in the fertility rate, and we estimate that more than 300,000 births did not take place as a result of the Famine. The effects were especially severe on the very young and the very old, a result echoed in the findings of demographic analyses of other famines. Our procedure permits a reconstruction of the Irish population by age and sex during the period 1821-1841. In addition, it yields year-by-year estimates of the birth rate over this period. We estimate that the rate fell by about 14 percent, a result robust to our assumptions regarding emigration. Economic historians have debated this issue, and we hope that our evidence, although preliminary, will be of assistance. Our analysis also permits year-by-year reconstruction of Irish population totals for the period 1821-1851. Two years are of particular interest. Virtually all recent writers, with the notable exception of Lee (1981), have suggested that the 1831 census returns overestimated the actual population resident in Ireland at that date. Our reconstruction supports the validity of the 1831 census figure. We obtain a total of 7,847,000, which is in good agreement with the disputed census figure of 7,767,000. But perhaps the most interesting figure is the population total for the end of 1845, the highest ever achieved in Ireland. We estimate that the population on the eve of the Great Famine was 8,525,000. Throughout the paper we have tried to highlight those areas in which the data are unreliable, unavailable, or distorted. We have tried to devise cross-checks for consistency and to test the sensitivity of the results to a range of assumptions. A case in point concerns the age-sex profile and volume of emigration to England, Scotland, and Wales. Additional work at the micro level would be helpful here. More solid evidence on Famine births would also be helpful. The parish registers we have sampled certainly provide a clue to trends, but we have only made a start in that respect. A much more comprehensive survey is needed to convey the national picture.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)     

教育水平显著提高,扫盲任务仍很艰巨

2000年第五次全国人口普查结果表明,在20世纪90年代,由于教育事业的迅猛发展,我国人口的受教育水平得到了显著提高.具体表现为:     

Eligibility for Maternity Leave and First Birth Timing in Great Britain

This paper examines the impact of maternity leave legislation on first birth timing in Great Britain. When maternity leave was introduced in Great Britain in 1976, the eligibility requirement for full-time employees was to have been working for the same employer for at least 2 years. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), this paper examines whether women postponed first birth in accordance with tenure requirements for maternity leave. Higher transition rates to first birth are found for those who had acquired enough employer tenure to qualify for maternity leave than for those who did not yet qualify. However, the causal role of maternity leave legislation for first birth timing is uncertain, since transition rates to first birth began to diverge by employer tenure even before 1976.