Articles
- Intrinsic
Growth Rates and Net Reproduction Rates in the Presence of Migration /
Samuel H. Preston, Haidong
Wang
Conventional measures of long-term population growth such as the
intrinsic growth rate and the net reproduction rate assume migration
rates to be zero. We develop expressions for analogous measures that
register the impact of net migration rates, and we develop a simple
method of estimating their values. Applying these new measures to data
for developed countries shows that allowance for migration raises net
reproduction rates by 0.2–0.3 in areas of overseas European settlement
and by approximately half as much in Northern and Western Europe. The
newly defined intrinsic growth rates in Eastern Europe are exceptionally
low at –1.7 percent to –2.4 percent per annum. In contrast, the
migration-adjusted intrinsic growth rate of the United States exceeds
those of Asia and Latin America. The formulas and estimation procedures
described should allow a more precise understanding of the implications
of current migration patterns for long-term growth prospects. [33, no.
4 (Dec 07):
657–666] (offsite
link*)
- New Evidence on the
Urbanization of Global Poverty /
Martin Ravallion, Shaohua
Chen, Prem Sangraula
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. [33, no.
4 (Dec 07): 667–701] (offsite
link*)
- Rethinking Historical
Reproductive Change: Insights from Longitudinal Data for a Spanish Town
/ David Sven Reher,
Alberto Sanz-Gimeno
A set of linked reproductive histories taken from the Spanish
town of Aranjuez between 1871 and 1950 is used to address key issues
regarding reproductive change during the demographic transition. These
include the role of child survival as a stimulus for reproductive
change, the use of stopping and/or spacing strategies to achieve
reproductive goals, and the timing of change. Straightforward
demographic measures are used and robust results are achieved. Initial
strategies of fertility limitation are shown to exist but are
inefficient, are mostly visible during the latter part of the
reproductive period, are designed mostly to protect families from the
effects of increases in child survival, and are based almost entirely on
stopping behavior. As mortality decline accelerates, strategies become
much more efficient, are visible at the outset of married life, include
spacing behavior, and eventually lead to important declines in completed
family size. The results of this study have implications for our
understanding of the demographic transition both in historical Europe
and in other regions of the world.
[33, no. 4 (Dec 07): 703–727] (offsite
link*)
- Sexual Behavior in
China: Trends and Comparisons /
William L. Parish, Edward
O. Laumann, Sanyu A. Mojola
Dramatic political,
economic, and social changes in China over the past several decades have
been accompanied by much discussion in popular media and among academics
of a fundamental transformation in Chinese sexual behavior. Several
studies have examined current Chinese sexual behavior but have been
limited to particular provinces or cities and have been based on
non-random samples. The potential threat of a generalized HIV epidemic
in China highlights the dearth of population-based information on
current patterns of sexual behavior that could help design better
intervention strategies and prevent misguided ones. This article uses
data from the first national probability survey of adult sexual behavior
in China completed during 1999–2000, along with a historical and
literature review, to address three key questions: (1) Has there been a
revolution in sexual behavior in China? (2) Is China unique compared to
other countries in these transformations? (3) What are the implications
of these findings for China’s risk of a generalized HIV epidemic?
[33, no. 4 (Dec 07): 729–756] (offsite
link*)
- The Decline of Son
Preference in South Korea: The Roles of Development and Public Policy
/ Woojin Chung, Monica Das
Gupta
For years, sex
ratios at birth kept rising in South Korea despite rapid development. We
show that this was not an anomaly: underlying son preference fell with
development, but the effect of son preference on sex ratios at birth
rose until the mid-1990s as a result of improved sex-selection
technology. Now South Korea leads Asia with a declining sex ratio at
birth. We explore how son preference was affected by development and by
public policy. Decomposition analysis indicates that development reduced
son preference primarily through triggering normative changes across
society—rather than just in individuals whose socioeconomic
circumstances had changed. The cultural underpinnings of son preference
in preindustrial Korea were unraveled by industrialization and
urbanization even as public policies sought to uphold the patriarchal
family system. Our results suggest that child sex ratios in China and
India may decline before those countries reach South Korean levels of
development, since the governments of both countries vigorously promote
normative change to reduce son preference. [33, no. 4 (Dec 07):
757–783] (offsite
link*)
Data and Perspectives
-
Religiousness and Fertility among
European Muslims /
Charles F. Westoff,
Tomas Frejka
Based on official data on religion, national origin, and other
indicators of ethnic origin, Muslim fertility in 13 European
countries is higher than that for other women, but in most countries
with trend data the differences are diminishing over time. Fertility
varies by country of origin of immigrants. Various European survey
data show that higher proportions of Muslim women are married and
their commitment to traditional family values is greater than among
other women. Muslim women are more religious than non-Muslim women
and religiousness is directly associated with fertility. Among
Muslim women, religiousness and commitment to family values are
equally important for fertility, while for non-Muslim women
religiousness is much less important. [33, no. 4 (Dec 07):
785–809] (offsite
link*)
Archives (offsite
link*)
- Charles Horton Cooley on
Disorganization of the Family
Fertility in the United States declined throughout the nineteenth
century and was at a level of around 3.5 births per woman by the
early twentieth century. (Replacement- level fertility, under
then-prevailing mortality conditions, was about 3.) This downward
trend—mirrored, with differences in timing, in Western
Europe—occasioned much official concern and academic pondering.
Explanations typically pointed to the manifold changes that
industrialization was bringing to the economy and society, and in
particular to the family. Examples of those changes were the
lessening of patriarchal authority, the emancipation of women, and
the increasing role of the state in what had formerly been family
responsibilities—such as children’s education. Contemporary accounts
of these changes and their effects—from authors such as John
Billings, Lujo Brentano, Frank Fetter, Adolphe Landry, E.A. Ross,
J.J. Spengler, and F.W. Taussig—anticipate the descriptions and
theorizing by social scientists in the post–World War II years about
what they named the demographic transition. (Many of those earlier
writings have been excerpted in PDR’s Archives department.)
Lately, the appearance of fertility levels nearer to a one- than a
two-child average in many parts of Europe has suggested to some
theorists that a new transition is underway—a “second” demographic
transition. The first transition, in this conceptualization, would
refer to the shift in demographic regime to one of low mortality and
near-replacement fertility; the second transition, to a subsequent
drop to fertility well below replacement level, leading (even with
continued mortality decline at older ages) to negative natural
increase. The two transitions supposedly have different sets of
drivers—in broad terms, the effects, respectively, of industrial and
postindustrial change. Although not often remembered for doing so,
many of the writers listed above did foresee a possible future of
depopulation brought on by ultra-low fertility—Landry, for instance,
could see no end to “the downward slope of fertility”; Spengler
wrote of the demographic “self-extermination” of the West. But very
likely none would have felt the need to invent a new transition. The
changes they were observing a century ago, in their estimation,
while deriving from the newfound economic conditions, worked through
shifts in values as well as costs. Notably, they emphasized the
change from a “bourgeois” to an “individualistic” family model and
remarked on the emergence of what would now be termed
“postmaterialist” values.
The story of family change related by the American sociologist
Charles Horton Cooley in the passage reprinted below (dating from
1909) accords well with such a one-transition view. For better-off
families, children beyond a small number get in the way of new
consumption opportunities. They are seen as “a source of
indefinitely continuous expense.” Alongside this shift in economic
perceptions is an increasing individualism, a demand for “personal
self-realization.” The modern family, characterized by “its intimate
sympathy and its discipline of love,” may be “a higher type” than
its predecessor, he writes, but the changes, while progressive, have
involved “much incidental demoralization.” The costs, borne
especially by women and children, are seen in “the often grievous
burden of disorganization.” Divorce, increasingly initiated by
women, becomes more common; children are given an exaggerated idea
of their “self-consequence.” But Cooley depicts the change in the
family not as something novel in human experience but rather as a
return to “the unschooled impulses of human nature”—the response to
conditions that “give an easy rein to undisciplined wills.” (For a
different but in some respects convergent analysis of family change,
from a British perspective, see the excerpt from Charles Henry
Pearson (1893) in the Archives department of PDR 29, no. 2.)
Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929) was a notable figure in the early
history of American sociology. (Lewis A. Coser devotes a chapter to
him in his Masters of Sociological Thought [1977].) In an
academic career spent wholly at the University of Michigan, he wrote
a series of widely read books, the best known of which was Human
Nature and the Social Order (1902), a study in social
psychology. The excerpt below is taken from a later work, Social
Organization; A Study of the Larger Mind (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1909). It comprises the whole of Chapter 31 (pp.
356–371), entitled “Disorganization: The Family.”
Book Reviews (offsite
link*)
-
Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion:
Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
Reviewed by James H. Mittelman
-
Michael J. Rosenfeld, The Age of
Independence: Interracial Unions, Same-Sex Unions, and the Changing
American Family
Reviewed by Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr.
-
Wolfgang Lutz, Rudolf Richter, and Chris
Wilson (eds.), The New Generations of Europeans: Demography and
Families in the Enlarged European Union
Reviewed by Michael S. Teitelbaum
-
Laura L. Lovett, Conceiving the
Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United
States, 1890–1938
Reviewed by Nancy Folbre
-
Michel Foucault, Security, Territory,
Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78;
translated by Graham Burchell
Reviewed by Geoffrey McNicoll
Short
Reviews (offsite
link*)
-
Sudhir
Anand, Fabienne Peter, and Amartya Sen (eds.),
Public Health, Ethics, and Equity
-
James
Chin, The AIDS Pandemic: The Collision of
Epidemiology with Political Correctness
-
Jennifer Cole and Deborah Durham (eds.), Generations and Globalization: Youth, Age, and Family in the New
World Economy
-
Wayne
A. Cornelius and Jessa M. Lewis (eds.), Impacts of Border Enforcement on Mexican Migration: The View from
Sending Communities
-
Rashid
Hassan, Robert Scholes, and Neville Ash (eds.), Ecosystems and
Human Well-being: Volume 1, Current State and Trends
-
Matthias Koch, Claus Harmer, and Florian Coulmas, Trilingual
Glossary of Demographic Terminology:
English-Japanese-German/Japanese-English-German/German-Japanese-English
-
Ian
Pool, Arunachalam Dharmalingam, and Janet Sceats, The New Zealand
Family from 1840: A Demographic History
Documents (offsite
link*)
- The World Health Organization on
Health Inequality, Inequity, and Social Determinants of Health
Measured in terms of increases in average expectation of life
country-by-country, the large majority of the world's population
benefited from major improvements in health in the second part of
the twentieth century. Notable exceptions to this favorable trend
are most of the countries of sub-Saharan Africa and countries of the
former Soviet Union. But the country averages conceal persistent and
significant differences according to social status. The aim of the
work of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health (CSDH) of
the World Health Organization is to study these differences and to
make recommendations for corrective action. Set up in March 2005,
the 19-member Commission, chaired by Michael Marmot of University
College London, published an Interim Report, titled "Achieving
Health Equity: From Root Causes to Fair Outcomes," in September
2007. An excerpt from this 61-page report—the section on Health
Inequality, Inequity, and Social Determinants of Health—is
reproduced below. It presents a crisp statistical description of
characteristic features of social differentials in health status
commonly found in all countries, including those exhibiting the most
favorable average expectancies of life. The presentation draws on
emerging work on this topic, extensively cited in the report. The
full text of the Interim Report can be accessed through CSDH's web
site: <<http://www.who.int/social_determinants/en>>.
* Journal subscribers will be able to access a PDF
of the article online; nonsubscribers will be given access after paying
a fee.
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