Instability,investment, disasters,and demography: natural disasters and fertility in Italy (1820–1962) and Japan (1671–1965)

This article examines whether natural disasters affect fertility—a topic little explored but of policy importance given relevance to policies regarding disaster insurance, foreign aid, and the environment. The identification strategy uses historic regional data to exploit natural variation within each of two countries: one European country—Italy (1820–1962), and one Asian country—Japan (1671–1965). The choice of study settings allows consideration of Jones’ (The European miracle, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981) theory that preindustrial differences in income and population between Asia and Europe resulted from the fertility response to different environmental risk profiles. According to the results, short-run instability, particularly that arising from the natural environment, appears to be associated with a decrease in fertility—thereby suggesting that environmental shocks and economic volatility are associated with a decrease in investment in the population size of future generations. The results also show that, contrary to Jones’ (The European miracle, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981) theory, differences in fertility between Italy and Japan cannot be explained away by disaster proneness alone. Research on the effects of natural disasters may enable social scientists and environmentalists alike to better predict the potential effects of the increase in natural disasters that may result from global climate change.     

Alfred Sauvy: Statistician,Economist, Demographer and Iconoclast (1898–1990)

Articles appearing in this journal are indexed in Current Contents Environmental Periodicals Bibliography Population Index CICRED's Review Sociological Abstracts Geo Abstracts GEOBASE Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life.     

Psychometric Properties of the Lesbian,Gay, and Bisexual Identity Scale–Turkish (LGBIS-TR)

The aim of the current study was to examine the psychometric properties of the Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Identity Scale (LGBIS; Mohr & Kendra, 2011) in a Turkish sample. Three hundred and ten LGB individuals participated and completed the Turkish version of the LGBIS (LGBIS-TR) along with the Satisfaction with Life, Positive and Negative Affect, and Self-Compassion Scales. Confirmatory factor analysis results yielded a good-fit for eight subscales of the LGBIS-TR. We also obtained satisfactory criterion validity and internal consistency reliability. Based on this initial study, the LGBIS-TR appears to be a psychometrically sound instrument to gauge LGB individuals’ identity experiences in Turkey. We discuss the results along with previous findings and limitations of the study, and we provide implications for further research and practice.     

13~(th) World Population Day Themes Poverty, Population and Development

On July 11th, hundreds of Beijing residents from all walks of life participated in a series of activities to commemorate the 13th World Population Day, which was themed 揚overty, Population and Development? China carries 21% of the world抯 population. Since the 1970s when the family planning policy was first carried out, China has effectively brought its rapid population growth under control and achieved a low fertility level. Meanwhile, poverty-stricken population also dropped from 250 mi…     

China''''s Employment Situation and Policies(Excerpts)

I. Basic Employment Situation With a large working-age population with a relatively low average level of education, China is facing severe challenges in employment. These include: the contradiction between workforce supply and demand; irrational employment structure; increasing pressure on the urban labor market; accelerated migration of surplus rural laborers to non-agricultural sectors; employment of a newly increased workforce; and reemployment of laid-off workers. Population Today …     

Trends,Age Patterns and Differentials in Childhood Mortality in Haiti (1960–1987)

This paper examines the trends, patterns and differentials in childhood mortality in Haiti between 1960 and 1987 with data from three surveys and one census. Data comparability is maximized by a series of adjustments, and both direct and indirect techniques are applied. The results indicate that a slow decline in childhood mortality has occurred since 1960 for the country as a whole. Neonatal survival has shown impressive gains, especially in rural Haiti. Post-neonatal mortality has not, however, declined at the same rate. Mortality between the ages of one and five years has declined at about the same pace as infant mortality, maintaining consistency with model patterns of mortality change. The overall national decline in child mortality appears to have consisted of two phases. The first occurred in rural Haiti during the late 1960s and early 1970s and was due largely to a fall in neonatal mortality. The second phase of the decline was concentrated in Port-au-Prince, and seems to have affected all ages of childhood.     

Assessing Health Endowment,Access and Choice Determinants: Impact on Retired Europeans’ (In)activity and Quality of Life

A future for the E.U., dominated by an ever-increasing population of retired citizens represents a major challenge to social and health policy in European countries. Under Rowe and Kahn’s (Gerontol 37(4):433–440, 1997) perspective on positive aging, this paper is interested in exploring the role of health on citizens’ active participation after retirement and social engagement to life and quality of life. This paper also aims at finding whether Sen’s (Public health, ethics, and equity. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004) capability approach or cumulative disadvantage or advantage theory relative to the access to health also verifies in a context of multi-national developed economies. The first part of this study is therefore concerned with generating a health indicator that enables this, whilst controlling for individual heterogeneity in self-rated health responses from 10,859 retired individuals from the SHARE survey. Socioeconomic determinants of health are found not to be critical in determining health in such a developed context whilst cumulative advantage is found relevant for the positive aging of Europeans. Evidence is found that active engagement in activities and quality of life are most certainly a prerogative for the more educated and the healthier retirees, hinting a strategy for European policymakers: cumulative advantage, leveraged by education and health policy, might just be the long-term strategy for contouring an aging and unproductive European population, transforming what could be a ‘burden’ into an asset.     

Statistical Communique on National Economic and Social Development(continued)

V. Domestic Trade Sales of consumer goods grew steadily in 2001. The total retail volume of consumer goods amounted to RMB3,759.5 billion, up by 10.1% over year 2000. Of this, the retail volume of consumer goods in urban areas reached RMB2,354.3 billion, up by 11.5% and that in counties and below, RMB1,405.2 billion, an increase of 7.7%. The turnover of the wholesale and retail trades was RMB2,551.1 billion, up by 10.7%, that of the catering, RMB436.9 billion, an increase of 16.4% and …     

Welfare State Development in Latin America and the Caribbean (1970s–2000s): Multidimensional Welfare Index,Its Methodology and Results

There is an ongoing debate between focalization and universalization on welfare policies as the best way to develop the welfare state in Latin America and the Caribbean. However, there is a need to develop a measure that exhibits the multidimensional nature of the welfare state, instead of focusing on the social spending dimension. Segura-Ubiergo (The political economy of the welfare state in Latin America: globalization, democracy and development. Cambridge University Press, New York, 2007) constructed a welfare effort index (WEI) to facilitate understand the relative degrees of welfare state development among Latin American countries. The WEI focuses mainly on social spending and ignores the other dimensions of welfare. Based on a comparative analysis of 17 Latin American countries and following the methodology of Segura-Ubiergo, a new index that aims at enriching the WEI was constructed. The new index is multidimensional in that it has eight indicators relating to three dimensions of welfare: social spending, coverage of welfare programs and outcome of welfare institutions. Principal component analysis was used for reducing the indicators into three indexes that represent three proposed dimensions of welfare. The combination of these three indexes gives the multidimensional welfare index. The results of the index account for more than 75 % of the data variance.     

Marital Status and Mothers’ Time Use: Childcare,Housework, Leisure,and Sleep

Assumptions that single mothers are “time poor” compared with married mothers are ubiquitous. We tested theorized associations derived from the time poverty thesis and the gender perspective using the 2003–2012 American Time Use Surveys (ATUS). We found marital status differentiated housework, leisure, and sleep time, but did not influence the amount of time that mothers provided childcare. Net of the number of employment hours, married mothers did more housework and slept less than never-married and divorced mothers, counter to expectations of the time poverty thesis. Never-married and cohabiting mothers reported more total and more sedentary leisure time than married mothers. We assessed the influence of demographic differences among mothers to account for variation in their time use by marital status. Compositional differences explained more than two-thirds of the variance in sedentary leisure time between married and never-married mothers, but only one-third of the variance between married and cohabiting mothers. The larger unexplained gap in leisure quality between cohabiting and married mothers is consistent with the gender perspective.     

Information,Education and Communication

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Race,Place, and Veteran Status: Migration among Black and White Men, 1940–2000

In this paper, I gauge the impact of veteran status on migration probabilities for black and white men in the late 20th century United States, comparing cohorts that were subject to various military staffing policies. I find that white veterans are more likely than are white non-veterans to live outside the state of their birth and to have recently migrated. These effects persist regardless of whether veterans were subject to the draft or the All Volunteer Force staffing policy, and are durable across the life course. Among blacks, elevated rates of veterans’ migration are first observed in 1980. These results illuminate a previously unidentified consequence of veteran status, and may point to a policy-linked mechanism through which prior military employment influences social mobility, the American labor force is redistributed, and the racial composition of states and localities is altered.     

Changes of Major Population and Family Planning Indicators(1996-2000)

1. Implementation of Population Plans (1996-2000) China had succeeded in bringing its population under control during the Ninth Five-Year Plan (1996-2000), in terms of the annual number of newborns in 2000 and the total population of the nation, as well as the annual growth rate, according to estimates by the China Family Planning Commission (SFPC). During this period, both the birth rate and natural increase rate reduced steadily and the momentum of population growth was bro…     

A History of Threat in Europe and Belgium (1920–1993)

A general index of social, economic, and political threat in Europe and Belgium was developed for the years 1920 to 1993. We asked 91 Belgian historians, experts in contemporary history, to rate, on 7-point intensity scales, the extent to which each year, between 1920 to 1993, the security and existence of either Europe or Belgium was threatened. In making their judgments, the historians must integrate most of the information contained in objective data known to them as causes of fear (crime, unemployment, apprehension at starting a family, buying a car, or starting a new business, etc.). The present threat index rests on a synthetic judgment because many official objective data available to historians either are incomplete or lack conceptual coherence. The index obtained has then been compared to known objective indicators of social, economic, or political threat. We obtained Cronbach's coefficients of 0.99 for Belgian historians. Corrected for serial dependency, the threat index for Belgium is found to depend on a 5-variable subset composed of: suicide, unemployment, and balance of trade, for the positive associations; and GNP and car registrations, for the negative associations. The Pearson correlation between the threat index for Europe and Belgium is 0.95 (N = 74, p < 0.001). Just as McCann and Stewin (1990) had developed a similar tool for North America, the aim of this multi-purpose tool was to monitor the mood of Europe and Belgium over time based on evaluations made by professional historians. McCann and Stewin's (1990) threat index for the US has a Pearson correlation of 0.65 (N = 67, p < 0.001) with the European threat index. The article concludes with a discussion first on the question of the role of threat producing discourses in the perception of threat, and second, on the question of Europe as a concept.     

Learning ‘Large Ideas’ Overseas: Discipline, (im)mobility and Political Lives in the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny

Abstract

In February 1946, the 20,000 sailors of the Royal Indian Navy, the colonial navy of the Government of India, mutinied. Having a number of grievances, from colonial rule of India, inefficient demobilisation procedures and ill treatment from superior officers, sailors on ships and shore establishments across the Indian Ocean took part in the mutiny, which represented the largest time a military force had disobeyed British Rule since the Mutiny of 1857. This paper examines the ways in which the geographies and mobilities of naval service shaped the political lives of the sailors in the RIN. On the one hand, both military (naval) and colonial forms of discipline worked through the spaces of the ship to attempt to control and order sailors’ lives. On the other, the mobile nature of life at sea, travelling from place to place and encountering colonial difference within the RIN, opened the door to different political ideas to influencing the sailors. At the same time, far from being a disconnected space, separate from the land, the naval ship combined with sailors’ land-based connections allowed them to contest and rework ‘landed’ political activity from the sea.     

Children’s educational attainment,occupation, and income and their parents’ mortality

Using data from Finland, this paper contributes to a small but growing body of research regarding adult children's education, occupation, and income and their parents' mortality at ages 50+ in 1970–2007. Higher levels of children's education are associated with 30–36 per cent lower parental mortality at ages 50–75, controlling for parents' education, occupation, and income. This association is fully mediated by children's occupation and income, except for cancer mortality. Having at least one child educated in healthcare is associated with 11–16 per cent lower all-cause mortality at ages 50–75, an association that is largely driven by mortality from cardiovascular diseases. Children's higher white-collar occupation and higher income is associated with 39–46 per cent lower mortality in the fully adjusted models. At ages 75+, these associations are much smaller overall and children's schooling remains more strongly associated with mortality than children's occupation or income.     

‘Facework’, Flow and the City: Simmel,Goffman, and Mobility in the Contemporary City

This paper contains a re‐reading of Simmel and Goffman with an eye to the mobility practices of the contemporary city. The paper offers a ‘new’ perspective on mobility in the contemporary city by re‐reading two sociological ‘classics’ as there is a need to conceptualise the everyday level of flow and mobility in the midst of an intellectual climate dominated by grand theories of networks and globalisation. In the re‐reading of Simmel and Goffman, the aim is to reach an understanding of how contemporary material mobility flows and symbolic orders and meanings are produced and re‐produced. You may argue that other academic disciplines such as anthropology and human geography have made important contributions to this understanding. What has not been done, however, is to show how these two sociological thinkers can move beyond mere application to this field of study. With their sociological sensitivity, they rather carry important insights that will benefit the sociology of mobility. Arguably Simmel and Goffman offer the opportunity to connect the global flows to the everyday level of social practice, as well as linking more basic/classic sociological theory to contemporary issues of mobility. The reason to ‘look back’ is therefore to capture some of the past's ‘sociological imagination’ and relate it to an important social phenomenon of the present.