The future of world population

Analysis of future population trends reveals a regional pattern of continued growth, dependent upon basic assumptions about demographic factors and the priority given to human rights, socioeconomic development, and global interdependence. Developing countries will account for 85-87% of world population growth, and the most rapid increase will occur in Africa. The optimum size of population remains debatable. Ecologist argue for a reduction to 1-2 billion people in order to be in balance with nature and maintain a high quality of life. A rapid, but plausible, fertility decline would result in a population of 10 billion by 2070. The lowest feasible UN projection is 8 billion. A 1-2 billion world population would not be feasible without drastic mortality increases and fertility declines. Population control is a highly charged and complex issue; feminists are not about to place responsibility for environmental degradation on women's excess fertility. The spirit of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights is that women have the right to determine family size with personal integrity and freedom rather than suffer coercion for the rights of society. Family planning is a necessary ingredient for achieving the goal of desired family size. The quality of life may be undermined by upholding human rights, without recognition of the context of socioeconomic development and global interdependencies. Global economic conditions, political crises, and environmental degradation can undermine even the best national development efforts. The most difficult task ahead is addressing priorities and forming a consensus. Human rights, socioeconomic conditions, and global interdependencies must be satisfied in a mutually beneficial way. When national and global goals conflict, a compromise must be reached. There are many unknowns. The challenge is to "identify a set of policies that will stabilize world climatic conditions, promote economic development, enhance the quality of life, and respect human rights." Investment in human capital, such as education and health, will help women to avoid unwanted pregnancies. Improving the status of women is key to socioeconomic development, human rights, and global interdependencies.     

The challenge of world health

2 development specialists have expounded on the demands world health has placed on public health. Striking declines in infant and child mortality occurred with the advent of biomedical and technical interventions in developing countries after World War II. At the same time, these interventions promoted longer lives by curing and/or treating chronic diseases in developed countries. In the 1970s, however, it was apparent that the hospital based, curative approach could not meet health needs and was very costly. In developed countries, biomedical and social sciences showed that chronic diseases did not occur due to modernization but from unhealthy behaviors, diet, and lifestyle. In fact, in 1975, the US Centers for Disease Control announced that unhealthy lifestyles contributed to 50% of all deaths while the medical system was responsible for only 11%. The US and other developed countries then began to promote healthy lifestyles, and in the 1980s, considerable improvements in health occurred, especially among adults. Developing countries which depended on the Western medical model did not experience health gains in the 1970s. Yet developing countries where health systems concentrated on carrying essential services to all people and promoted basic hygiene and sound dietary practices continued to achieve considerable health gains. In 1978, WHO an UNICEF hosted the International Conference on Primary Health Care in Alma Ata, the Soviet Union to hold these developing countries with community based health systems as models of primary health care (PHC). The 1980s witnessed the spread of PHC especially in the form of child survival which focused on oral rehydration therapy and breast feeding. The biomedical and social sciences are needed to move this health policy and program strategy forward. Governments must see to policies that promote healthy people. Political will is needed to make human welfare a high priority.     

The fertility transition around the world

In this paper, we study the evolution of the distribution of fertility rates across the world from 1950 to 2005 using parametric mixture models. We demonstrate the existence of twin peaks and the division of the world’s countries in two distinct components: a high-fertility regime and a low-fertility regime. Whereas the significance of twin peaks vanishes over time, the two fertility regimes continue to exists over the whole observation period. In 1950, about two thirds of the world’s countries belonged to the high-fertility regime and the rest constituted the low-fertility regime. By the year 2005, this picture has reversed. Within both the low- and the high-fertility regime, the average fertility rate declined, with a larger absolute decline within the high-fertility regime. Visually, the two peaks moved closer together. For the low-fertility regime, we find both β- and σ -convergence but we cannot establish any convergence pattern for the high-fertility regime. Our results support the idea of conditional convergence where the condition is the successful initiation of the fertility transition. The results are less supportive of the existence of a unique high-fertility equilibrium.     

The choice of factor mobility in a dynamic world

This paper compares the steady-state welfare implications of opening a two-country overlapping-generations world to international labor or capital mobility. By capturing the dual nature of labor mobility through the effect of migrants' savings on capital formation, this dynamic setting recovers the asymmetry between capital and labor denied to them in the existing static literature. It is shown that the optimal choice of factor mobility from a national viewpoint depends on the state of the economy with respect to the Golden Rule and on migrants' average savings ratio with respect to that of non-migrants.I would like to thank anonymous referees for useful comments.     

The present value of population growth in the western world

Abstract In conventional steady-state growth theory with technical progress exogenous, faster population growth causes lower consumption. This conclusion has influenced national policies. With technical progress endogenous, however, higher population growth causes higher consumption. Steady-state equilibrium analysis is not appropriate for policy decisions, though. Rather, appropriate analysis compares two or more growth rates beginning from equal initial positions, with comparison of the present value of consumption streams per person. In the paper the supply of and demand for knowledge is first analysed and the most plausible technical progress functions are derived. Various population growth rates are then simulated with different specifications and parameters. With virtually every variant, faster population growth shows better consumption with discount rates up to between five and ten per cent above the long-run adjusted riskless rate. With pensions included in the analysis, faster population growth would seem even more beneficial. Even at very high discount rates, lower population growth rates imply present values only a little higher than those for higher population growth rates. The advantage is overwhelmingly with higher population growth in this growth-theoretic analysis.     

The female aging body: A systematic review of female perspectives on aging,health, and body image

While most body image research has focused on young female populations, evidence has shown that as few as 12% of older women are satisfied with their body size. Recent studies have also highlighted how anti-aging discourses are promoting unrealistic body norms, which have shown to contribute to poor body image and altered health behaviors. A systematic review of empirical studies focused on older women’s perspectives of health, body image, and the aging body is presented. Findings support that body image is a persistent, lifelong issue for women and should be considered when implementing healthy aging policies and practices.     

The effect of female education on fertility: A simple explanation

This paper investigates the structure of the relationship between female education and fertility. It is based on data published in First Country Reports of the World Fertility Surveys for eleven countries—Costa Rica, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Panama, Fiji, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Indonesia. The cumulative marital fertility of educated women is shown to be similar in different settings. A lack of uniformity in the education and fertility relationship including the curvilinear nature of this relationship observed across countries is shown to be attributable to marked differences between countries in the average fertility of women with no education rather than to the presumed differences in the average fertility of the educated women. The structure of the relationship is shown to be similar across several developing countries. This analysis suggests that advancement in female education can be expected to influence fertility behavior even without simultaneous changes in other factors such as increasing opportunity for participation in the paid labor force in the modem sector.     

The changing contribution of smoking to educational inequality in female mortality

The negative association between education and mortality is well established in international research. The harmful effect of smoking on health is well known. However, the contribution of smoking to educational inequality in mortality varies across studies, and in some studies, the contribution is negligible. This paper demonstrates the use of an analytical approach to provide one explanation for this phenomenon. Analysing nationally representative survey data for two cohorts of Australian women born in 1920–1928 and 1945–1951 respectively, we found that in the 1994–2006 period, the less educated are subject to higher mortality by 38–50 %. In the total sample, the smoking contribution to excess mortality due to lower education is negligible. However, when the cohorts are analysed independently, the smoking contribution ranges from ?13 % among those born in 1920–1928 to +23 % among those born in 1945–1951. The smoking contribution is only seen in the cohort-specific analysis because smoking is more prevalent among tertiary degree holders in the earlier cohort but more prevalent among less educated women in the later cohort. The disaggregated analytical approach taken here deserves further attention in research on inequality.     

The fertility impact of changes in the timing of childbearing in the developing world

This study examines the role of tempo effects in the fertility declines of less developed countries. These effects temporarily inflate the total fertility of a population during periods when the age at childbearing declines and deflate it when childbearing is postponed. An analysis of data from the World Fertility Surveys and the Demographic and Health Surveys demonstrates that fertility trends observed in many less developed countries are likely to be distorted by changes in the timing of childbearing. In most countries women are delaying childbearing, which implies that observed fertility is lower than it would have been without tempo changes. This pattern is most clearly documented in Taiwan, where accurate birth statistics from a vital registration system make it possible to estimate the tempo components of fertility annually from 1978 to 1993. The small but unexpected rise in the total fertility of Colombia in the early 1990s is attributed to a decline in the negative tempo distortion that prevailed in the 1980s. Similar interruptions of ongoing fertility declines may occur in the future in other countries when existing negative tempo effects are removed.     

The older female patient with a complex chronic dissociative disorder

Dissociative disorders are rarely considered in the diagnostic assessment of older women, despite the fact that the existence, appearance and characteristics of certain dissociative disorders in older populations has been known and described since the 1980s. This communication reviews the core phenomena of Dissociative Identity Disorder and related forms of Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, the natural history of their phenomena from youth to old age, and describes common presentations of Dissociative Disorders in older women. It also reviews the treatment of complex chronic dissociative disorders and discusses alternative approaches to their psychotherapy in the older female patient. It is crucial to recognize and respect the importance of appreciating individual differences among older dissociative patients and to individualize their treatments accordingly.     

The non-looks of the mobile world: a video-based study of interactional adaptation in cycle-lanes

ABSTRACT

This empirical study uses video data to examine interactional adaptation between cyclists and pedestrians in a relatively new cycle-lane. Existing research on intersections shows order is achieved through the frequent use of a look-recognition-acknowledgement sequence. Whereas this is found in the cycle-lane interactions, there is also an important divergent technique which on the surface seems less cooperative. Others are made to cede space based on ‘doing and being oblivious’, in short, forms of non-looking force others to take evasive action and subtly alter their line of travel. Here the dynamic nature of this obliviousness is shown through empirical examples. Even though it is not always easy to distinguish between the two forms of non-looking, it is concluded that ‘doing oblivious’, whilst possibly annoying for others, is most probably harmless, but there are good reasons to be more concerned about ‘being oblivious’, for it may lead to collisions between pedestrians and cyclists. Aspects of non-looking provide an important addition to knowledge of the mobile world, suggesting we renew attention to specific sites where people concert their movements in minutely detailed ways.     

The skills and autonomy of female part-time work in Britain and Sweden

Most OECD countries have experienced an increase of female part-time employment in the last decades. It has been argued that part-time work may give greater employment flexibility, enabling mothers to reconcile conflicting demands of family and work and thereby facilitating their integration into the wage economy. At the same time, it has been suggested that female part-time work implies segmentation of the labour force into a core and a periphery, with marginalized, low qualified jobs for part-time employees. However, little attention has been given to the possible mediating effect of the institutional context on potential job quality disadvantages of part-timers. We examine this question by comparing the skills and autonomy of female part-time workers in two countries, Britain and Sweden, often considered as representing quite distinct forms of institutional regime. The results show that female part-time employees in Sweden hold positions of higher skill and have more autonomy compared to their equivalents in Britain. Even so, both British and Swedish part-time employees face relative disadvantage when compared to female full-time workers. We conclude that differences in the institutional systems of Sweden and Britain do have a significant effect on the absolute skill level of part-time work. However, the relative disadvantage of part-timers persists despite Swedish policies giving greater salience to improvements in the quality of work.     

The effect of female migration on infant and child survival in Uganda

This article uses data from the 1996 Uganda Demographic and Health Survey to examine whether migration of women improves the survival chances of their children to age five. We expand on prior research by testing not only the hypothesized positive effect of rural-urban migration, but also the effects of other migration stream behaviours on child survival. Results show that up to 10% of children die before age five and within-group differences in mortality exist among urban and rural children depending on their mother's migration status. Only urban-urban migration was significantly related to child survival, compared to rural non-migrants, after controlling for other factors, although other streams of migration (rural-urban, urban-rural, rural-rural) were positively related to child survival. Generally, migration explains a small component of the variance in child survival. Several other factors, including parents' education, household size, household headship, mother's age at birth, duration of breastfeeding, and place of delivery have a significant predictive power on child survival.     

The impact of school entry laws on female education and teenage fertility

The literature on school entry laws in the USA suggests that school entry laws affect educational success in offsetting ways, where students born after the entry cutoff date tend to achieve higher test scores yet complete fewer years of schooling. However, the laws have little impact on a number of other outcomes, including fertility, wages, and employment. This paper has two goals. First, using a North Carolina dataset which individually links birth certificate data to school administrative records, it more fully explores the opposite impacts on educational success than previous papers and investigates why students born after the cutoff date have lower educational attainment despite doing better in school. Second, it investigates the impact of school entry laws on teenage fertility and provides some evidence that test scores and years of education have negative impacts, but that these impacts offset each other in the case of school entry laws.     

The impact of “parent care” on female labor supply decisions

Data from the 1986–1988 Survey of Income and Program Participation panels were used to analyze how informal-caregiving of disabled elderly parents affected female labor supply. Instrumental variables analyses suggested that coresidence with a disabled parent leads to a large, significant reduction in work hours, due primarily to withdrawal from the labor force. Although the impact of nonhousehold member caregiving was insignificant, evidence of an effect was stronger when commitment of caregiving time was greater. Projections of female labor force participation rates should account for potential increases in caregiving demand due to the aging of the U.S. population.