Demography and housing demand—what can we learn from residential construction data?

There are obvious reasons why residential construction should depend on the population’s age structure. We estimate this relation on Swedish time series data and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development panel data. Large groups of young adults are associated with higher rates of residential construction, but there is also a significant negative effect from those above 75. Age effects on residential investment are robust and forecast well out-of-sample in contrast to the corresponding house price results. This may explain why the debate around house prices and demography has been rather inconclusive. Rapidly aging populations in the industrialized world makes the future look bleak for the construction industry.

吉林省2000-2005年生育情况分析

吉林省2005年人口出生率7.89‰,低于全国平均水平,人口和计划生育工作形式总体是好的。但通过对吉林省2000-2005年生育情况的调查发现,全省低生育水平面临反弹的现实风险。我们必须清醒地看到,违法生育数量相对增加,一胎违法生育所占比例较大,再婚违法生育占违法多胎生育比例较大。在详细分析产生问题原因的基础上结合工作实际提出解决违法生育增多问题的建议。     

人口计生系统学习型组织推广的思考

人口与计划生育系统学习型组织由“点”到“面”的推广是完全有必要的。在推广的早期、中期和后期各有几项重点工作,包括完善人口与计生目标管理责任制的指标体系,普及学习方法和学习工具的应用,强化学习型组织推广的评估。这些推广工作将有助于人口计生综合改革的深入发展。     

中国传统社会救济与城市贫困人口社会救助理念建设

中国传统社会救济是现代社会救助不可回避的历史基础 ,其救济思想源于道义性。城市居民社会救助制度是对传统社会救济的根本性改革 ,其基本原则与传统社会救济截然不同 ,即强调社会救助中政府的法定责任、公民的法定权利和对应义务的统一。然而 ,传统社会救济思想以其强大的惯性力量影响着现代社会救助理念建设 ,使其表现出一定的滞后性 ,主要为 :对政府责任和公民权利强调不够 ;对民众社会救助义务宣传不力。理念建设的滞后使部分民众和工作人员对社会救助认识模糊、混乱 ,阻碍了社会救助制度健康发展。     

西部开发中深化流动人口计划生育管理的若干问题探讨

西部大开发将使流动人口与日俱增,要深化流动人口计生管理,领导重视是前提,宣传教育是先导,贯彻落实是关键,部门协调是保障,管理服务是途径,综合治理是方向.     

Conflicts in urban fringe in the transformation era: An examination of performance of the metropolitan growth management in Beijing

The performances of urban growth management are often criticized because their original objectives are frequently inconsistent with local development facts. Underlying the many reasons for this are the political and institutional contexts that influence policy-making and development activities. The urban fringe, a zone is managed to against urban sprawl in many countries, represents the conflicts between urban management system and local development resulting from political transformation. This study examines the case of decentralised-concentration strategy, one of the most important metropolitan growth management in Beijing since the 1990s, and sheds some lights on the performance of the growth management in the transformation context. The results suggest that the aims of municipal growth management to concentrate developments in urban fringe have partly been achieved through actual local developments; however, some unexpected and illegal local developments outside the planned areas are counterproductive from the perspective of municipal growth management. The performance of the present growth management is being challenged by new trends towards political decentralisation and locally fiscal responsibilities. In the interest of future policymaking, the dominant central planning system in Beijing should take these decentralisation trends into growth management account, compared with the great progress in decentralisation in economy system. The urban policy needs to shift from the dictatorial manner and put more efforts into creating a harmonious relationship between municipal growth management and actual local demands on development.     

A lost family-planning regime in eighteenth-century Ceylon

Based on Dutch colonial registers (thombos), this paper reconstructs fertility for two districts in Ceylon, 1756–68. It overcomes challenges in data quality by establishing the outer bounds of plausible estimates in a series of scenarios. Among these, total fertility rates (TFRs) averaged 5.5 in one district, but only 2.7 in the other. These figures exclude the victims of infanticide, a custom noted in European travelogues between about 1660 and 1820. Sex ratios among children differed depending on the number of older siblings, and overall, 27?per cent of girls are missing in one district and 57?per cent in the other. There was little significant variation either in the TFR or the sex ratio by socio-economic status, suggesting that poverty was not a key factor in motivating infanticides. Instead, we argue that at least parts of Ceylon had a forward-looking culture of family planning in the eighteenth century, which was lost in subsequent decades.     

基于分群体非均衡推进的新型农村社会养老保险模式创新研究——以山东临沂农村养老保险为例

通过对山东省临沂市农村社会养老保险实施情况的研究以及探讨,提出一种新的制度模式——分群体非均衡推进。该制度主要针对不同的群体现状,先以计生户和失地农民为突破口,鼓励其主动参加社会养老保险,然后逐步带动其它群体加入到社会养老保险行列,最终实现全面覆盖。     

Defending the Family,Defending the Faith: An Analysis of The Family: A Proclamation to the World,Religious Identity,and the Politics of Same-Sex Marriage in a Mormon Community

In this article, we apply Peter Berger's theory of religion as a social construct to learn how The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon Church) advances a heteronormative view of family relationships in the United States using a document titled The Family: A Proclamation to the World. Furthermore, applying cultural studies theory, we examine how believing Mormons negotiate the tension that arises when their secular values compete with those expressed by Church leaders. We argue that, although the Proclamation addresses a number of issues, the Church offers a closed text that emphasizes war narratives in which same-sex marriage is portrayed as a threat to LDS identity and the heteronormative family. This closed text is further legitimized by emphasis on the authority of Church leaders as oracles of God. The study participants largely accept the dominant narrative, and those who reject it, do so with some trepidation.     

Pension reforms in EU11 countries: An evaluation of post‐socialist pension policies

This article evaluates the pension policy pathways of the 11 former state socialist nations that have joined the European Union since 2004. Focusing primarily on the post‐2004 period, the analysis discusses the most important measurable outcomes of these countries’ pension reforms, in terms of poverty alleviation, pension adequacy and fiscal sustainability. Going beyond the quantifiable concepts, we also investigate the quality of the 11 countries’ pension systems in terms of equity as well as efficiency, emphasizing the less conspicuous design errors present in these systems. Although these errors have received little attention to date, they may harm pension schemes along several dimensions, including their fiscal sustainability.