Immigration, integration and fiscal sustainability

Economic theory points out that immigration of even low-skilled immigrants may improve public finances in Western welfare states, and it is sometimes suggested that fiscal sustainability problems in Western countries caused by ageing populations could be solved by increasing immigration. We examine consequences of various immigration scenarios using the large-scale computable general equilibrium model Danish rational economic agents model describing the Danish economy. It turns out that increased immigration will generally worsen the Danish fiscal sustainability problem. Improved economic integration of immigrants and their descendants, however, may alleviate the problems of the public sector considerably. Responsible editor: Klaus F. Zimmermann     

Keeping things simple: why the Human Development Index should not diverge from its equal weights assumption

Using a range of statistical criteria rooted in Information Theory we show that there is little justification for relaxing the equal weights assumption underlying the United Nation’s Human Development Index (HDI) even if the true HDI diverges significantly from this assumption. Put differently, the additional model complexity that unequal weights add to the HDI more than counteracts the improvement in goodness-of-fit. This suggests that, in some cases, there may be limited validity in increasing the complexity of a range of other composite sustainability indices.     

Population Health as a Fundamental Criterion of Social Ecology

This essay elaborates the common insight that “strong” communities respond more successfully to serious threats than “weak” communities and it claims that the successful communities will have better population health rates. It nominates an appropriate measure of population health as the criterion of success, and advances a universally applicable concept of strength, conceptualized as institutionalized problem-solving capacity, based on three components: the application of specialized knowledge, open debate on policy alternatives and mobilization behind reformers and reform movements. The relationship may be compressed into a threat-capacity ratio interaction formula: ph = C/t where ph is a measure of population health, C is problem-solving capacity and t is one or more existential threats. The community is the locus of causality and it is assumed that communities attempt to adapt to threats by problem-solving. The Threat-Capacity dynamic is explained by a combination of neo-Darwinian and neo-Durkheimian theory. Three kinds of applications support its plausibility.     

Inter- and transdisciplinary approaches to population–environment research for sustainability aims: a review and appraisal

The causes and consequences of demographic changes for the environment, and the possible ways of influencing population dynamics to achieve ‘sustainability’, have been the subject of many debates in science and policy in recent decades. However, the body of knowledge concerning relationships between population dynamics and sustainability is quite fragmented, dispersed over many disciplines, and encompasses diverse theories, paradigms and methodologies. This paper reviews four selected frameworks: linear, multiplicative, mediated, and system-theoretical approaches and perspectives. We represent how population–environment relationships are conceptualized, provide examples of research questions and accepted approaches, and critically assess their utility for different sorts of research for sustainable development. We note the growing recognition of the value of embracing complexity in population–environment research, and how this is consistent with normative aims of development.     

关于中国NEET的分析

文章通过分析中国的NEET(notineducation.employ-mentortraining)状况,认为中国NEET族人数众多,并从其产生原因着手,认为中国NEET有进一步增加的趋势,在分析可能带来的危害之后,对解决办法提出简单的对策建议。     

Drivers of land use change and household determinants of sustainability in smallholder farming systems of Eastern Uganda

Smallholder farming systems in sub-Saharan Africa have undergone changes in land use, productivity and sustainability. Understanding of the drivers that have led to changes in land use in these systems and factors that influence the systems’ sustainability is useful to guide appropriate targeting of intervention strategies for improvement. We studied low input Teso farming systems in eastern Uganda from 1960 to 2001 in a place-based analysis combined with a comparative analysis of similar low input systems in southern Mali. This study showed that policy-institutional factors next to population growth have driven land use changes in the Teso systems, and that nutrient balances of farm households are useful indicators to identify their sustainability. During the period of analysis, the fraction of land under cultivation increased from 46 to 78%, and communal grazing lands nearly completely disappeared. Cropping diversified over time; cassava overtook cotton and millet in importance, and rice emerged as an alternative cash crop. Impacts of political instability, such as the collapse of cotton marketing and land management institutions, of communal labour arrangements and aggravation of cattle rustling were linked to the changes. Crop productivity in the farming systems is poor and nutrient balances differed between farm types. Balances of N, P and K were all positive for larger farms (LF) that had more cattle and derived a larger proportion of their income from off-farm activities, whereas on the medium farms (MF), small farms with cattle (SF1) and without cattle (SF2) balances were mostly negative. Sustainability of the farming system is driven by livestock, crop production, labour and access to off-farm income. Building private public partnerships around market-oriented crops can be an entry point for encouraging investment in use of external nutrient inputs to boost productivity in such African farming systems. However, intervention strategies should recognise the diversity and heterogeneity between farms to ensure efficient use of these external inputs.     

COMBINING SOCIAL,ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL INDICATORS TO MEASURE SUSTAINABLE HUMAN WELL-BEING

In this paper an attempt is made to illustrate some ways in which social, economic and environmental indicators can be combined to tell a coherent story about the sustainability of human well-being. Using examples from the fields of health, the fishing industry and energy, it is argued that one's success at constructing a single comprehensive system of indicators of human well-being will always be limited by one's particular point of departure from social, economic or environmental indicators. If that is indeed the case, then it would be helpful for researchers to abandon attempts to construct single comprehensive utopian systems in favour of agreed upon lists of important goals, indicators and monitoring procedures that can be used to implement progressive social change.     

积极老龄化与中国：观点与问题透视

人口老龄化问题日益严重,如何应对其带来的挑战受到国际社会的普遍关注,而积极老龄化的提出则为人们打开了一个新的视角。文章将在回顾积极老龄化国际发展历程的背景下,在理清我国老龄化政策实践与变迁脉络的基础上,从政治、经济、文化等视角分别对我国的年龄化问题进行描述与阐释,展现我国老龄化的现实图景,并以问题为导向,探寻我国的积极老龄化之路。     

Rethinking the Foundations of Sustainability Measurement: The Limitations of the Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI)

The objective of sustainability measurement is to move environmental decision making toward more rigorous, quantitative and empirical foundations. One of the most comprehensive attempts to lay out the foundations for sustainability measurement has been offered by the Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI). This paper aims to advance the science of sustainability measurement by assessing the validity and reliability of this composite index in order to provide new insights for future indicator development. The architecture of the ESI is validated against the Pressure-State-Response (PSR) model, after which an exploratory factor analysis is conducted to reveal the latent structure of the index. Further, the performance of the ESI is tested in cross-national regression models. The results indicate a lack of consistency with the well established PSR model and a potential bias towards economically developed countries grounded in the architecture and weighting mechanism of the index. A re-weighted index (Equivalised ESI) is constructed, resulting in a new ranking of countries’ sustainability. The Equivalised ESI improves the measurement qualities of the index, and in so doing actually reinforces the rich-country bias of the ESI. Put differently, the Equivalised ESI brings the deficiencies of the original ESI to the fore. This paper illustrates that there are serious conceptual problems and validity concerns with defining the ESI as a sustainability measure. Taken together, the findings reinforce the need to reconsider future foundations of sustainability measurement in order to ensure that it is clear both what is being measured and how well.     

The Sustainability of Population Health

The study of population health encompasses analysis of the fundamental influences on human health, the consequences of such influences for societies and individuals, and the ways in which people and institutions respond to these consequences. A theme lacking from the present discourse is that of the sustainability of population health. To be sustainable, societies must respect the boundaries of natural systems and scorn disparities in standards of living. Preliminary analysis of data from 152 countries reveals an inverse relation between measures of population health and sustainability, although there are examples of societies where this inverse relation does not hold. Future research in population health should begin to question the sustainability of improving the health of some populations at the expense of others, and investigate how some societies appear to be able to achieve population health without compromising the health of the biosphere.     

Preparedness for taking care of elderly parents:"first, you get ready to cry"

The results reported in this article are from a larger, mixed-methods study of the factors influencing the preparedness of adult daughters for taking care of elderly parents. This article focuses on findings surfacing in unstructured interviews with daughters revealing an area of caregiving not addressed in survey items, that of daughters' emotional reactions to multiple losses. Actual and anticipatory losses clustered into two categories: loss of the parent and loss of one's own youth. Implications for health care providers are detailed, including: recognizing each daughter's unique life situation; providing anticipatory and long-term emotional support and counseling; and assisting with problem solving, grief work, and making meaning of losses.     

Assessing Urban Public Safety via Indicator-Based Evaluating Method: A Systemic View of Shanghai

The explosive development of urban Shanghai after China’s economic reform in 1978 has attracted wide attention. There are a plethora of studies attempting to capture the fast dynamics in this global city. Looking into the urban dynamics from a public safety perspective, however, eludes the current literature. Urban public safety has become a primary concern of urban sustainability in recent years due to escalated potential loss if urban public safety is severely breached. This is even more so for megacities like Shanghai. Assessing the current status of urban public safety hence becomes an imperative task for urban sustainability. This research initiates a detailed assessment effort through building a relatively comprehensive set of public safety indicators. Four general aspects of Shanghai’s urban public safety are identified, i.e., urban development, urban crime and instability, urban housing and livability, and urban disasters. From officially published data, field survey and interviews, 34 individual indicators are chosen. Principal component analyses are conducted for each of the four aspects, and a synthetic urban public safety index is derived. The analysis suggests that urban Shanghai’s public safety is gradually increasing due primarily to continuous economic success and increased investment in public safety preparation, education, and prevention. The assessment index is also shown to be able to capture major events affecting Shanghai’s public safety.     

Community: Toward an integration of research,theory, evaluation,and public policy considerations

This article presents a paradigm for the analysis of communities and investments designed to improve them. Its fundamental objective is to provide the researcher, the theoretician, the evaluator, and the public policymaker with a common analytic framework. Direct and indirect effects of investment programs (e.g., in education, economic development, and health) can be documented longitudinally, and the community analyzed as an independent, dependent or mediating variable. The roots of this approach in social science and policy theory are explored. Five concepts (Status, Change, Interaction, Duality of Interaction and Change, and Viability) are incorporated. Community is operationally defined to include fifteen sectors whose interactions and changes can be studied systematically over time. This approach can help to clarify how a community, its people, culture, and institutions, and the outside world both influence and are influenced by investment programs.     

The Zen of Sustainable Use of the Planet: Steps on the Path to Enlightenment

At its best, the quest for sustainable use of the planet aspires to a harmonious relationship between human society and natural systems. At its worst, sustainable use is an assertion that human ingenuity and technology can free humankind from biophysical constraints and its dependence upon ecological life support systems. Although science guided by reason is essential to reaching informed decisions on sustainability, it must be accompanied by a new ethos, or set of guiding beliefs. Science can never reduce uncertainty on the complex multivariate systems called ecosystems to the degree that explicit legislation would be possible to protect the components on a species by species, habitat by habitat, ecosystem by ecosystem, and landscape by landscape basis without going to ridiculous extremes. This circumstance does not, however, invalidate attempting to define conditions appropriate to achieving sustainability. Some consensus must be reached on the broad, general conditions governing human society's relationship to the environment. A shared ethos would promote sustainable use and reduce the possibility of harsh penalties exacted upon species that do not respond adequately to alteration in their environment.     

Desertification ... in perspective

Desertification remains high on the international agenda of critical environmental problems as the decade of the '80's draws to a close. The fact that this subject has attracted renewed high level attention over the past year is a source of considerable encouragement. The "bad news" is that such recognition reflects the failure of the international community to address the desertification problem in a meaningful way over two decades—this despite the considerable enthusiasm, detailed planning and extensive commitments of governments, international bodies and the private sector.While lack of adequate funding is often implicated, reasons for the woeful performance are found elsewhere: an initial underestimation of the depth and tenacity of the problem; the continuing absence of agreement on the dimensions and key indicators of desertification, prerequisites for measuring trends and progress; the erosion of public confidence and government support through failure to publicize and build on the few successes; and widespread civil unrest in many of the affected countries which has thwarted meaningful antidesertification efforts.Prospects for the 1990's depend upon new commitments and follow-through both by governments of affected nations and by the development assistance community. The former must provide a more favorable political and social context for success. This means tackling more aggressively problems of population growth, land tenure, and civil disruption. The donor community, for its part, must overcome the scattering of its intellectual, technological and financial resources, and rebuild its own and others' confidence by demonstrating that the resource base can indeed be stabilized and enhanced at a meaningful scale. Recognition of and commitment to the long-term requirements of antidesertification campaigns are also required of all parties.This paper was prepared for the symposium, Review of the 1977–87 Decade of Action to Combat Desertification, under the authority and sponsorship of the American Association for the Advancement of ScienceCommittee on Arid Lands. The views expressed are solely those of the author and not those of the OECD and/or its Member countries.     

Immigration,investment, and real wages

When a country is the recipient of large-scale, politically motivated immigration – as has been the case for Israel in recent years – the initial impact is to reduce real wages. Over the longer term, however, the endogenous response of investment, together with increasing returns, may well actually increase real earnings. If immigration itself is not wholly exogenous, but respond to real wages, they may be multiple equilibria, that is, optimism or pessimism about the success of the economy at absorbing immigrants may constitute a self-fulfilling prophecy. Received August 22, 1994 / Accepted August 23, 1995     

我国城镇贫困人口现状分析

分析城镇贫困人口的现状是解决城镇贫困问题的必要前提。我国城镇贫困人口规模大,增长速度快,行业特征、地域特征明显,结构性、阶层性贫困人口并存,大部分属于相对贫困,但自救能力较差。与这些特征相适应,应该从提高劳动者素质等七个方面着手解决城镇贫困人口问题。     

韩国人口结构变化对储蓄的影响

目前在韩国,随着人口年龄结构的不断老化,必然对经济增长产生负面影响。但通过仔细分析人口年龄结构变化可以预测,即使在人口老龄化的背景下,今后10年间的经济增长潜力将会类似于现在的增长潜力或趋于更高的增长,目前正处于对应未来长期性低增长的准备时期。因此,企业、政府及国民都应充分利用此时期,积极解决因青年人口减少导致的技能人力不足的问题;积极解决人口老龄化背景下的老龄劳动力利用问题;积极解决个人寿命延长导致的养老问题等。     

A time series of instrumental fertility variables

Temporal variations in conventional fertility measures reflect the operation of instrumental variables: quantitative and temporal intentions; success in achieving intentions; and reproductive conditions. A set of such variables is described, using data from the 1975 National Fertility Study. There was a large decline in the number of intended conceptions, a recent large rise in the extent of their delay, a very large decline in rates of failure to delay or terminate fertility, and a very large recent rise in sterilization. But one problem proved important and intractable: When the data source is a cross-sectional survey, the length of open interval is inherently different for real and for synthetic cohorts, it is strongly related to reproductive intention, and that affects the classification of exposure to risk in the open interval.