Economic Report of the President: Strengthening Retirement Security

The 2002 Annual Report of the US Council of Economic Advisers (a 448‐page document, formally an Annex to the Economic Report of the President Transmitted to the Congress February 2002, Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office) offers an extended discussion (Chapter 2, pp. 65–97) of the topic of “strengthening retirement security.” The increasing salience of the subject is driven in part by demographic factors: increasing life expectancy at older ages and the concomitant change toward an older age distribution amplified by lower fertility. The report notes the “monumental demographic shift” that is taking place in the United States: “Over the next 35 years, the number of workers for every retiree will fall from 3.3 to just 2.1—a 36 percent drop.” The opening sections of Chapter 2 are reproduced below. They address two main subjects. First, the various rationales for a national retirement system as a proper function of government are presented. In the United States such a system is the institution of Social Security. Second, the various sources of income for elderly households are described. Social Security is the largest among these, but not predominant: in 1998 it amounted to some 38 percent of total income. Nonpublic sources—labor earnings, asset income, and private pensions—each make up sizeable shares of income for the elderly. (Income from public assistance is a small fraction of the total, yet it represents a significant element of income for elderly persons with little or no income from other sources.) Demographic trends, the report suggests, make it imperative that in the future Americans “take even greater responsibility for their own retirement security by increasing their personal saving.”     

New Evidence on the Urbanization of Global Poverty

One‐quarter of the world's consumption poor live in urban areas, and that proportion has been rising over time. Over 1993–2002, the count of the “$1 a day” poor fell by 150 million in rural areas but rose by 50 million in urban areas. The poor have been urbanizing even more rapidly than the population as a whole. By fostering economic growth, urbanization helped reduce absolute poverty in the aggregate. There are marked regional differences: Latin America has the most urbanized poverty problem, East Asia has the least; there has been a “ruralization” of poverty in Eastern Europe and Central Asia; in marked contrast to other regions, Africa's urbanization process has not been associated with falling overall poverty.     

Alvin Hansen on Economic Progress and Declining Population Growth

The driving forces of economic growth, according to the mainstream of classical economic thinking, are threefold: technological innovations, the opening up of new territories and discovery of new resources, and increase in population. In interaction, in an entrepreneurial market economy, these forces generate growth not only in the aggregate but also per capita. Evidence of their power was seen in the long stretch of rising living standards in the West over the nineteenth century, despite the ups and downs of the business cycle. However, the economic experience of the interwar years, and in particular the Great Depression of the 1930s, suggested that the forces were largely spent and hence that future economic prospects were gravely imperiled. The Keynesian revolution in economics was a response to the evident malfunctioning of the capitalist economic system, although the policy recipes it offered (for increasing demand and investment to levels capable of generating an equilibrium consistent with full employment of productive resources, especially labor) by no means commanded unanimity. The most prominent American contributor to and spokesman for the new line of economic analysis—often called “the American Keynes”—was Alvin H. Hansen (1887–1975), who took up his professorship of political economy at Harvard in 1937, just after the appearance of Keynes's General Theory. In that post, which he held until his retirement in 1956, he was one of the most influential economists of the era as a theorist, policy adviser, and teacher. Hansen interpreted the economic problems of the 1930s not just as the manifestation of a particularly sharp cyclical downturn, but as evidence of secular stagnation caused by the closing of the economic frontier, sluggishness in technological innovation, and, not least, “a drastic decline in population growth.” This “stagnation thesis” is most succinctly set out in his presidential address to the American Economic Association, delivered in Detroit, 28 December 1938, under the title Economic Progress and Declining Population Growth. The address is re‐produced below from the March 1939 issue of the American Economic Review. (The opening paragraphs of the address, and two paragraphs, immediately preceding the closing paragraph, in which Hansen discusses changes in US national income in the 1930s, have been omitted.) Hansen's analysis of the effects of declining population growth in many ways echoes the thesis set out by Keynes in his seminal Galton Lecture delivered to the Eugenics Society in 1937 (reprinted in the Archives section of PDR 4, no. 3): a demographic slowdown decreases opportunities for profitable investments and increases levels of attempted saving, hence pushes the economy toward a low‐growth equilibrium at which resources are underutilized and unemployment is high. Hansen puts special emphasis on demographically induced shifts in the composition of output. He suggests that, beyond its direct positive effect on investment and output, population growth also has an indirect enhancing effect on these factors by facilitating technological progress–contrary to the “older Malthusian view.” In his policy proposals Hansen was more interventionist than Keynes, advocating a more intrusive government role in the economy as a possible means of escaping the vicious cycle of low demand and high unemployment. As to government action to reverse demographic trends seen as deleterious, neither Keynes nor Hansen argued for policies to increase fertility, presumably because they saw them as both inappropriate and, in comparison to remedial economic policy measures, inefficient or unfeasible. The demands of the war economy in the years following Hansen's address took care of the employment problem, and the immediate postwar decades brought the stimuli of pent‐up consumer demand, an outpouring of technological innovations, a reopening of the economic frontier produced by a more liberal trade regime, and, also, an acceleration of population growth. The result was rapid overall economic growth and increasing levels of per capita income. Keynesian demand management played some role in this economic success story: by the end of the 1960s even US President Richard Nixon pronounced himself a Keynesian. But it offered no remedy for the stagflation that eventually followed. The growth‐promoting recipes favored in the last decades of the century (especially in the most successful developing economies) were anything but Keynesian: limited government, fiscal restraint, and globalization. Yet recent and anticipated demographic trends, especially in Europe—notably fertility decline and population aging—make Hansen, once again, interesting reading. Commitments of the modern welfare state for health care, retirement pensions, and job security command wide approval, but they have boosted governments' weight in the economy and made labor markets inflexible, unemployment high, and retirement early—developments that may increasingly impose a brake on economic growth and on improvements of living standards. Reform measures to ease these burdens are, in principle, straightforward, but their immediate social costs are heavy and their rewards are delayed, hence resistance to reform is strong and growing. This is likely to stimulate the search for alternative policies that offer politically more palatable tradeoffs—some of which may turn out to have an unmistakably Hansenian flavor. As to future population trends, Hansen, despite his reference to a “drastic decline in population growth” based on a comparison of nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century Western demographic change, envisaged a convergence to a stationary population or a tendency toward very slow decrease. Yet some economies are already locked into a demographic pattern that augurs sharper declines and more rapid population aging, enhancing the relevance of the issues posed by Hansen. In Germany, for example, in the absence of immigration, the population between ages 20 and 40 will decline from 21.6 million in 2005 to 16.3 million in 2025—a drop of 23 percent. Over the same time period, the population aged 60 and older will grow from 20.5 million to 25.8 million—an increase of 26 percent. Serious efforts to slow population decline and retard population aging by stimulating fertility would of course add another major burden to government budgets.     

Deadly Cities? Spatial Inequalities in Mortality in sub‐Saharan Africa

We investigate whether sub‐Saharan African countries are affected by an “urban mortality penalty” repeating the history of industrialized countries during the nineteenth century. We analyze Demographic and Health Surveys from several sub‐Saharan African countries for differences in child and adult mortality between rural and urban areas. For the first decade of the 2000s, our findings indicate that child mortality is higher in rural than in urban areas for all countries. On average, child mortality rates are 13.6 percent in rural areas and 10.8 percent in urban areas. In contrast, average urban adult mortality rates (14.1 percent) have exceeded rural adult mortality rates (12.4 percent). Child mortality rates are on average 65 percent higher in urban slums than in formal settlements. Child mortality rates in slum areas are, however, still lower than or equal to those in rural areas for most countries in our sample.     

Oswald Spengler on Cosmopolis and Depopulation

Historians are professionally averse to grand civilizational themes, especially where predictions may be entailed. The German historian Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), whose membership in the academic fraternity of his discipline has often been questioned, was an exception. His two‐volume magnum opus. The Decline of the West, published in 1918 and 1922 (English translation, 1928), in its time attracted much public and professional attention. (It remains in print.) It presents an enormously ambitious tableau of universal history seen as the unfolding of the fates of eight cultures, with a focus on four main strands: Indian, Classical, Arabian, and Western. In Spengler's interpretation, imbued with cultural and historical pessimism, the West was exhibiting symptoms found in earlier civilizations in decline. “Civilization,” in Spengler's vision, was a stage that follows cultural flowering—creative manifestations of the culture's unique soul expressed in art and thought. Civilization's preoccupation is with the enjoyment of material comforts; the sequence from “culture” to “civilization” represents the very antithesis of progress. Spengler saw the West as having entered that latter phase in the nineteenth century: a phase in which, in the words of the synoptic chart appended to Volume 1 of The Decline of the West, “The body of the people, now essentially urban in constitution, dissolves into formless mass.” Urbanism, the emergence of “megalopolis,” or “cosmopolis“—the world city—is a distinguishing and crucial feature of that declining civilization. A passage (section V, including some translator's notes) from the chapter titled The Soul of the City in Vol. II of The Decline of the West, which has the subtitle Perspectives of World History, is reproduced below. It offers arresting characterizations of the morphology of urban forms and of the rise of the world city. As longer‐term consequences (for the West “between 2000 and 2200”) Spengler foresaw the “formation ofCeasarism”; “victory of force‐politics over money”; “increasing primi‐tiveness of political forms”; and “inward decline of the nations into a formless population, and constitution thereof as an Imperium of gradually increasing crudity and despotism.” As to demographic consequences, Spengler highlights the emerging “sterility of civilized man“—“an essentially metaphysical turn toward death.”“Children do not happen, not because children have become impossible, but principally because intelligence at the peak of intensity can no longer find any reason for their existence.”“Prudent limitation of the number of births” eventually leads to a “stage, which lasts for centuries, of appalling depopulation.” Immigration apart, the time scale specified by Spengler for depopulation—“for centuries”—may be seen today as relatively cautious. Should Europe's current period fertility level—slightly below a TFR of 1.4—be translated into cohort performance, it would yield an intrinsic annual rate of population growth of roughly ‐1.5 percent. Within 200 years, such a growth rate would reduce a population to 5 percent of its original size. From The Decline of the West: Volume 2 by Oswald Spengler, translated by C. F. Atkinson, copyright 1928 and renewed 1956 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.     

An Italian Statement on International Migration

Increasing realization of the implications of persisting below‐replacement fertility in Europe—shrinking absolute numbers combined with a rising proportion of the elderly—is giving new salience to policy considerations regarding immigration in the countries most affected by low fertility. The recent United Nations report on “replacement migration” (see the Documents section in the June 2000 PDR) highlighted the issue through illustrative calculations showing the size of immigrant streams that would be needed for achieving specified demographic targets in selected lowfertility countries, given continuation of present fertility and mortality trends. For example, the UN report suggested that in Italy—which has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world—maintaining a constant population over time would require a net influx of some 12.6 million immigrants during the next 50 years, and maintaining a constant labor forceage population (ages 15–64) would require a net inflow of 18.6 million. Yet immigration policy in Western Europe has become increasingly restrictive during the last quartercentury, and the official policy stance that regulating immigration is strictly within the domain of a country's sovereign right has been assiduously maintained. (International treaty obligations qualify that right in the case of bona fide asylum seekers; however, the definition of that category is also subject to the discretion of the receiving countries.) Thus, although within the European Union national borders are open to EU citizens, the power of regulating immigration from outside the EU is retained by the individual countries rather than subject to EU‐wide decisions. Suggestions coming from the developing countries to follow up the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development with an intergovernmental conference on international migration and development were set aside by the potential immigrant‐receiving countries as overly contentious. A statement by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Italy, Lamberto Dini, delivered at the 55th General Assembly of the United Nations, 13 September 2000, may be a sign of a notable shift in official approaches to immigration policy by at least one EU member state. The statement, in a departure from the practice of touching lightly upon a wide range of issues in international affairs, typical in high‐level ministerial speeches given at that UN forum, is devoted essentially to a single topic: international migration. It characterizes migration “between or within continents” as an international problem and advocates “coordinated and integrated” instruments in seeking a solution. It suggests that “today, with a declining birth rate and an aging population, Europe needs a strategy that embraces the complex process of integrating people from different regions of the world.” The rules for international migration, the statement claims, should be set in a global framework, such as provided by the United Nations. In the “age of globalization,”“a solidarity pact is needed to find the best and most effective way of balancing the supply and demand of labor.” With the omission of opening and closing ceremonial passages and a brief comment on the problem of debt relief, the statement is reproduced below.     

Alan Greenspan on the Economic Implications of Population Aging

At the 2004 annual symposium of central bank leaders sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board, devoted his opening remarks on 27 August to a discussion of the economic implications of population aging. The full text of his remarks is reproduced below. Greenspan's high prestige and great influence on US economic policy lend special interest to his views on this much-discussed subject (see also the next Documents item in this issue). He outlines the coming demographic shift in the United States in language that is characteristically cautious and qualified. (The elderly dependency ratio will “almost certainly” rise as the baby boom generation retires, Greenspan says, although elsewhere he terms the process, more accurately, inexorable.) The main factor responsible for population aging he identifies as the decline of fertility. Immigration is an antidote, but, to be effective, its size would have to be much larger than is envisaged in current projections. Greenspan's assessment of the economic consequences of the changing age structure highlights the prospect of a deteriorating fiscal situation in the United States: chronic deficits in the Social Security program over the long haul, assuming that existing commitments for benefits per retiree are met, and even greater difficulties for the health care system for the elderly—Medicare—in which the effects of increasing numbers in old age are amplified by advances in medical technology and the bias inherent in the current system of subsidized third-party payments. The sober outline of policy choices imposed by population aging—difficult in the United States, but less so, Greenspan notes, than in Europe and Japan—underlies the need for counteracting the declining growth of the population of labor force age through greater labor force participation and later retirement. Beyond that, growth of output per worker can provide the key “that would enable future retirees to maintain their expected standard of living without unduly burdening future workers.” This requires continuation of policies that enhance productivity, such as deregulation and globalization, and greater investment. In turn, the latter presupposes greater domestic saving, both personal and by the government, as the United States cannot “continue indefinitely to borrow saving from abroad.” Demographic aging requires a new balance between workers and retirees. Curbing benefits once bestowed is difficult: only benefits that can be delivered should be promised. Public programs should be recalibrated, providing incentives for individuals to adjust to the inevitable consequences of an aging society.     

China's New Demographic Reality: Learning from the 2010 Census

China conducted its sixth modern census in 2010, recording a total of 1.34 billion people. This article presents an overview of the early census results. The data are of reasonable quality but contain some apparent defects where adjustments may be required. The census confirms that China has entered the era of demographic modernity and depicts the vast transformation of the country's rural‐urban distribution. Life expectancy has risen by 3–4 years in the decade since the last census, while fertility remains well below replacement—probably as low as 1.5 births per woman—and the sex ratio at birth is still significantly elevated. Low fertility and falling old‐age mortality are leading to continued and rapid population aging. Several coastal provinces grew by as much as 40 percent in the last decade, while a number of inland provinces have recorded population decline. China has reached an overall urban proportion of 50 percent.     

The Johannesburg Summit on Health and Sustainable Development

The World Summit on Sustainable Development was held in Johannesburg, South Africa, 26 August‐4 September 2002. The meeting was a follow‐up to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) that took place in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 but with a mandate broader than that of the Rio conference: the Summit was to consider strategies toward sustainable development in all its dimensions. According to the opening paragraph of the Plan of Implementation adopted by the Johannesburg Summit, the Rio conference “provided the fundamental principles and the programme of action for achieving sustainable development.” But while reaffirming commitment to the Rio principles, the Plan states that it intends to “further build on the achievements made since UNCED and expedite the realization of the remaining goals.” A topic conspicuously missing from the deliberations of the Rio conference was population, even though rapid population growth has a plausible bearing on sustainable development and specifically on the problem of poverty, an issue at the center of the discussions concerning sustainability. It had been expected that Johannesburg would make amends for that omission. In the ten years between the two conferences, the size of the world's population increased by some 790 million persons. Of this growth, 754 million, or 95 percent, occurred in the countries the United Nations classifies as “less developed.” The population of these countries grew by 18 percent between the two conferences, as compared with a 3 percent growth in the more developed countries. The countries classified as “least developed“—a subset of the less developed countries consisting of 48 countries, predominantly African, with a 2002 population of nearly 700 million—grew during the interconference period by 29 percent. This record of population growth since the Rio conference may be supplemented by the projections of the United Nations up to 2050. The medium variant of these projections for the next 48 years envisages a slight population decline in the more developed countries and an addition of some 2 billion persons to the less developed group. For the least developed countries, the UN projects a population of more than 1.8 billion in 2050, some 164 percent larger than the current population size. Although the magnitudes of past population growth and its likely future dynamics are well known, they attracted very little attention at the Johannesburg meeting. The Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development, a concise political document issued at the closing of the conference along with the Plan of Implementation, pledges “to place particular focus on, and give priority attention to, the fight against the worldwide conditions that pose severe threats to the sustainable development of our people.” It then proceeds to specifics: “Among these conditions are: chronic hunger; malnutrition; foreign occupation; armed conflicts; illicit drug problems; organized crime; corruption; natural disasters; illicit arms trafficking; trafficking, in persons; terrorism; intolerance and incitement to racial, ethnic, religious and other hatreds; xenophobia; and endemic, communicable and chronic diseases, in particular HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis” (Paragraph 19 of the Declaration,). The Plan of Implementation, a 27,000‐word document, was the main product of the Johannesburg meeting. Apart from a mention of the Cairo conference on Population and Development, the Plan's treatment of population issues is confined to health. The relevant section—section VI, titled Health and sustainable development—is reproduced below in full. (Paragraph numbers have been retained.) It presents a statement of goals couched in general exhortative terms (“integrate,”“promote,”“provide,”“improve,”“develop”), and specifies some quantitative targets, notably to reduce “by the year 2015, mortality rates for infants and children under 5 by two thirds, and maternal mortality rates by three quarters,” and “reduction of HIV prevalence among young men and women aged 15–24 by 25 per cent in the most affected countries by 2005 and globally by 2010.” The full text of the Plan can be found at http://www.un.org/jsummitlhtmlldocumentslsummit_docsl21Q9_planfinal.htm     

Reassessing the Insurance Effect: A Qualitative Analysis of Fertility Behavior in Senegal and Zimbabwe

A number of prominent demographers have recently reiterated the argument that a lasting mortality decline is a key determinant of the fertility transition. Of the main hypothesized pathways linking fertility to mortality, the one least studied is the insurance hypothesis: the notion that, in high‐mortality contexts, people decide to have more children in order to anticipate possible future child deaths and lessen the risks of having too few surviving offspring. In‐depth interviews and focus groups from Zimbabwe and Senegal are used to examine this hypothesis and to extend it into a broader theory of reproductive decision making under uncertainty. Whereas insurance strategies are frequent in Zimbabwe and occur in urban Senegal, in the higher‐mortality settings—the rural Senegalese site and the recent past described by respondents in Zimbabwe and urban Senegal—deliberate fertility‐limitation strategies are rare. The data depict fundamental changes in attitudes, strategies, and behaviors concerning family size over time and, in Senegal, over space. Important reproductive goals and risks extend far beyond numbers of children and mortality. Parents seek to have healthy, successful children for many reasons including companionship, descendants, and old‐age support. Diverse investments in child quality (their education, health, etc.) and quantity (numbers of births) are the main means to attain these goals and, less recognized by demographers, are also important ways for parents to manage uncertainty in family‐building outcomes; the “classic” insurance mechanism is only one, often minor, aspect of the quantity option.     

The “difference between heaven and earth”: Urban–rural disparities in well-being in China

Although China is a rapidly developing nation, rural–urban disparities in well-being remain large, and perhaps have become larger than in the early years of the Communist period because the urban sector has benefited from China's transition to a market economy much more than has the rural sector; or perhaps have become smaller as earning opportunities in the export-oriented manufacturing sector have increased for those from rural origins. Economic disparities are exacerbated by institutional arrangements that have created a two-class society based on registration (hukou) status with sharp rural–urban distinctions in the public provision of schooling, health care, housing, and retirement benefits. Indeed, it is fair to say that China built an urban welfare state on the backs of the peasants.     

Science,Modernity, and the Making of China's One‐Child Policy

China's one‐child‐per‐couple policy represents an extraordinary attempt to engineer national wealth, power, and global standing by drastically braking population growth. Despite the policy's external notoriety and internal might, its origins remain obscure. In the absence of scholarly research on this question, public discourse in the United States has been shaped by media representations portraying the policy as the product of a repressive communist regime. This article shows that the core ideas underlying the one‐child policy came instead from Western science, in particular from the Club of Rome's world‐in‐crisis work of the early 1970s. Drawing on research in science studies, the article analyzes the two notions lying at the policy's core—that China faced a virtual “population crisis” and that the one‐child policy was “the only solution” to it—as human constructs forged by specific groups of scientists working in particular, highly consequential contexts. It documents how the fundamentally political process of constituting population as an object of science and governance was then depoliticized by scientizing rhetorics that presented China's population crisis and its only solution as numerically describable, objective facts. By probing the human and historical character of population research, this article underscores the complexity of demographic knowledge‐making and the power of scientific practices in helping constitute demographic reality itself.     

Aging women and men in the medical profession: The effect of gender and marital status on successful aging and retirement intent in Australian doctors

Despite increasing interest from the medical profession in aging and retirement, we know little about effects of gender, marital status, and cohort on aging within the profession. We surveyed 1,048 Australian doctors from “younger” (55–64) and “older” (65–89) cohorts, investigating gender and marital effects on perceptions of successful aging, career, and retirement intent. Women intend to retire earlier. Younger cohort and married women more frequently viewed their career as a calling, while women in general, and single women more frequently, endorsed personal successful aging more than men. Broader understanding of the different experiences of aging for men and women doctors is needed.     

Vladimir Putin on Raising Russia's Birth Rate

The total fertility rate in what is now the Russian Federation has been below replacement level during much of the last 40 years. By the late 1990s it was barely above 1.2 children per woman. There may have been some recovery since: the United Nations estimate for 2000–05 is 1.33. Other reports set the 2004 rate at 1.17. Countries elsewhere in Europe have fertility levels that are equally low or even lower, but the Russian demographic predicament is aggravated by mortality that is exceptionally high by modern standards. Thus, despite large‐scale net immigration (mostly due to return of ethnic Russians from other republics of the former Soviet Union), the population in the last decade‐and‐a‐half has been shrinking: of late by some 700,000 persons per year. The United Nations medium estimate assumes a steady recovery of the total fertility rate to reach a level of 1.85 by 2050 and a considerable improvement in survival rates during that period—notably an increase in male life expectancy at birth of more than ten years. It also assumes further modest net immigration at a steady rate, amounting to a total of somewhat over 2 million by midcentury. Under these stipulations the projected population of Russia in 2050 would be 112 million—some 31 million below its present size. By that time, 23 percent of the population would be aged 65 and older. The government's concern with the demographic situation of the country and its intent to improve it have been manifest in various official statements, notably in the annual State of the Nation Address given by the president to the Federal Assembly (or State Duma). Formerly a subordinate theme (see the Documents item in the June 2005 issue of PDR), the issue constituted the centerpiece of the 2006 Address, delivered on 10 May in the Kremlin by President Vladimir Putin. Policies regarding health and mortality were given short shrift in the speech—road safety, bootleg alcohol, and cardiovascular diseases being singled out as areas of special concern. The president's remarks on immigration are of greater interest: immigration of skilled persons is to be encouraged. They must be educated and law‐abiding and must treat the country's culture and national tradition with respect. The main focus of the address, however, was on the birth rate and policies to be introduced to raise it. (The need for an “effective demographic policy” as seen from the Kremlin was of course also voiced in the later stages of the Soviet era. See, for example, the excerpts from the addresses delivered by then Party Chairman Leonid Brezhnev and Premier Nikolai Tikhonov to the 26th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1981 that appear in the Documents item in the June 1981 issue of PDR.) In detail and specificity, and also in terms of the economic cost of the measures envisaged, Putin's speech is without parallel in addressing population policy matters by a head of state in Europe. The demo graphically relevant portion of the address is reproduced below in the English translation provided by the website of the president's office « http://www.kremlin.ru/eng ». Calling Russia's demographic situation “the most acute problem facing our country today,” Putin terms its causes as “well known,” but lists only economic factors, presumably because these, at least in principle, lend themselves to remedial measures that the Russian government, its coffers now swollen with petrodollars, should be able to provide. His starkly economic interpretation of the problem of low fertility (in Russia apparently taking the form of convergence to a single‐child pattern) may be overly optimistic. Causes of electing to have only one child may lie deeper than those Putin names: low incomes, inadequate housing, poor‐quality health care and inadequate educational opportunities for children, and even lack of food. Putin's proposed policies to attack these problems in part consist of a major upgrading of existing child care benefits: to 1,500 roubles a month for the first child and 3,000 roubles for the second. The latter amount is roughly equivalent to US$113, a significant sum given Russian income levels. Maternity leave for 18 months at 40 percent of the mother's previous wage (subject to a ceiling) and compensation for the cost of preschool childcare round out the basic package proposed. Benefits are to be parity‐dependent, highlighting the pronatalist intent of the measures. Thus the child benefit for the second child is to be twice as large as for the first, and payment for preschool childcare is to cover 20 percent of parental costs for the first, 50 percent for the second, and 70 percent for the third child. Putin mentions “young families” as recipients, but the payments are clearly directed to mothers. (Even the usually obligatory reference to western European–style paternity leave is missing.) The most innovative element of the proposed measures, however, is support for women who have a second birth. The state should provide such women (not the child, as called for in some European precedents) “with an initial maternity capital that will raise their social status and help resolve future problems.” Citing expert opinion, Putin says that such support “should total at least 250,000 roubles [about $9,300] indexed to annual inflation.” Evidently assuming, optimistically, that there will be many takers, Putin says that carrying out all these plans will require not only a lot of work but also “an immense amount of money.” The measures are to be launched starting January 2007.     

Son Preference and the Persistence of Culture: Evidence from South and East Asian Immigrants to Canada

Preference for sons over daughters, evident in China's and South Asia's male sex ratios, is commonly rationalized by poverty and the need for old‐age support. In this article we study South and East Asian immigrants to Canada, a group for whom the economic imperative to select sons is largely absent. Analyzing the 2001 and 2006 censuses, 20 percent samples, we find clear evidence of extensive sex selection in favor of boys at higher parities among South and East Asian immigrants unless they are Christian or Muslim. The latter finding accords with the explicit prohibition against (female) infanticide—traditionally the main sex‐selection method—in these religions. Our findings point to a strong cultural component to both the preference for sons and the willingness to resort to induced abortion based on sex.     

Undercounting Urban Residents in Bolivia: A Small-Area Study of Census-Driven Migration

Employing a small-area study approach in a single urban area in Bolivia, a country with high rates of internal circular migration, we describe how, in the months before the November 2012 census, local leaders and neighbors, concerned with maximizing the per capita resources their residential districts and rural communities could claim from central government, threatened to employ sanctions against absent individuals whom they judged to be regular residents. We use three types of data—a two-wave household survey, data from vehicle toll booths, and photographic logs of a minibus station—to show how these threats generated substantial movement out of the urban area, leading to an urban undercount of roughly 20 % of prime-age adults and 50 % of those aged at least 50. More generally, we argue that these data highlight how local leaders’ increasingly sophisticated attempts to shape data extend beyond the well-known examples from autocratic states. This is driven by a combination of intensive urban–rural connections, leaders’ greater democratic accountability to local voters, increasing fiscal transparency at the national level, increasing fiscal accountability of governments to transnational neoliberal institutions pushing “transparency” and “evidence-based” policy, and more overt talk about “resource sharing” that is rooted in an evidence-based planning paradigm. Since these structural conditions exist in many other developing countries, the possibility of equivalent urban undercounts in forthcoming censuses needs to be anticipated and avoided.     

On Integrating Immigrants in Germany

Immigration to Germany in the decades following World War II made the Federal Republic the host of the largest number of immigrants in Europe. The size of the population with an immigration background is on the order of 15 million, nearly one‐fifth of the total population. (Many of these are ethnic German returnees.) Although restrictive policies and a less dynamic economy in recent years slowed the annual number of immigrants and asylum seekers, the interrelated demographic influences of very low fertility, negative natural population increase, and population aging make continuing future immigration likely and, judged by influential domestic interests, desirable. Anxieties about inadequate integration of immigrants in German society are, however, apparently strongly felt by large segments of the native population. The “Grand Coalition” government that took office in November 2005 considers the formation of an effective policy of integration a high priority. On 14 July 2006 an “Integration Summit” was convened in the Chancellery with the active participation of representatives of immigrant groups. Chancellor Angela Merkel called the Summit “an almost historical event.” Reproduced below in full is a non‐official English translation of a government statement (entitled “Good coexistence—Clear rules”) presented to the participants at the opening of the meeting. Intended as a “start of the development of a national integration plan,” the statement highlights existing deficiencies of integration, especially problems with second‐ and third‐generation immigrants: lack of mastery of the German language, weaknesses in education and training, high unemployment, lack of acceptance of the basic rules of coexistence, and violation of the law. The importance of these issues is underlined by a demographic fact noted in the statement: by 2010 it is expected that in Germany's large cities 50 percent of the population under age 40 will have an immigrant background. The statement recognizes the government's responsibility to help immigrants learn German and become better informed about the country's laws, culture, history, and political system. In turn, it demands reciprocal efforts from migrants living permanently and lawfully in Germany. The original German text of the statement is available at the Bundeskanzleramt home page: « http://www.bundesregierung.d »     

Urban‐Rural Mortality Differentials: An Unresolved Debate

Historians and demographers have long debated the existence, causes, and consequences of historical differences between urban and rural mortality levels. In Europe it has been usual to observe excess mortality in cities compared to the countryside, but in East Asia, by contrast, it has been found that urban areas had relatively favorable mortality environments. The debate continues because a number of pertinent questions remain to be resolved. For example, the way in which mortality is measured may influence the apparent extent of the differential, as may the way in which“urban” and“rural” are defined. Cultural factors need to be taken into account, including the practices of childrearing and the conventions surrounding baptism. Examples drawn from Japan, China, England, and France illustrate the issues involved in comparative analysis, while the urban‐rural mortality continuum is examined for nineteenth‐century England and Wales using log‐normal distributions.     

“Population Invasion” versus Urban Exclusion in the Tibetan Areas of Western China

This article examines the confluence of local population transitions (demographic transition and urbanization) with non‐local in‐migration in the Tibetan areas of western China. The objective is to assess the validity of Tibetan perceptions of “population invasion” by Han Chinese and Chinese Muslims. The article argues that migration to Tibet from other regions in China has been concentrated in urban areas and has been counterbalanced by more rapid rates of natural increase in the Tibetan rural areas—among the highest rates in China. Overall, it is not clear whether there is any risk of population invasion in the Tibetan areas. However, given that non‐Tibetan migration to Tibet has been concentrated in urban areas, Tibetans have probably become a minority in many of their strategic cities and towns, and non‐Tibetan migrants definitely dominate urban employment. Therefore, while the Tibetan notion of population invasion may be a misperception, it reflects a legitimate concern that in‐migration may be exacerbating the economic exclusion of Tibetan locals in the context of rapid urban‐centered development.     

David Riesman on Phases of Population Growth and Social Character

Probably the most widely read work of sociology in the United States during the past century was The Lonely Crowd, a nearly 400‐page study by David Riesman, written, according to the first edition, in collaboration with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer. The book appeared in 1950, published by Yale University Press. The initial print run was 3,000; an abridged edition came out as a paperback in 1953 as a Doubleday Anchor Book. It eventually sold more than 1.4 million copies. (The book is still in print in a Yale University Press paperback edition.) Its intriguing title no doubt contributed to this phenomenal popularity, as did its readable and often informal style and its use of a time‐honored mode of social commentary, offering a statistics‐free exposition of the argument. The book bears no resemblance to what now passes for scientific analysis in sociology, but draws instead on erudition, historical learning, and personal observation and insight. But most of all, the explanation for the book's success is that Riesman's searching and sharp‐eyed examination of social trends in modern industrial society responded to a felt need for self‐examination in midcentury America. Actually, the title of the book was an add‐on; it does not appear in the text itself. The subtitle is more informative: A Study of the Changing American Character. Riesman defined “social character” as “the patterned uniformities of learned response that distinguish men of different regions, eras, and groups.” Making such distinctions imposes the need for a suitable categorization of historical stages with which a typology of social character can be persuasively associated. Riesman's chosen criterion for classifying societies and identifying such stages was demographic. His discussion sought to describe “possible relationships between the population growth of a society and the historical sequence of character types” and, specifically, to “explore the correlations between the conformity demands put on people in a society and the broadest of the social indexes that connect men with their environment—the demographic indexes.” In doing so, Riesman adopted the dassificatory scheme of classic demographic transition theory. Drawing on Frank Notestein's work, he distinguished three demographic phases: “high growth potential,”“transitional growth,” and “incipient population decline.” The three dominant social character types identified by Riesman, tracing a historical, although of course overlapping sequence, were “tradition‐directed,”“inner‐directed,” and “other‐directed”: they correspond to, indeed reflect, the three phases of population growth and its associated demographic‐structural characteristics. The excerpt reproduced below is from Chapter I (“Some types and character of society”) of the first edition of the book (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950). It provides a concise presentation of the study's conceptual scheme and of the argument seeking to validate it. (The 1953 paperback edition amplifies footnote 1 in the excerpt as follows: “The terminology used here is that of Frank W. Notestein. See his ‘Population—The Long View,’ in Food for the World, edited by Theodore W. Schultz (University of Chicago Press, 1945).”). David Riesman was born on 22 September 1909. His original field of study was law; his career as a lawyer included clerking for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. Between 1946 and 1958 he was on the faculty of social sciences at the University of Chicago and after that, until his retirement, he served as professor of sociology at Harvard University. He died 10 May 2002.