With the longest life expectancy for men and the second longest for women, Hong Kong typifies our planet s aging population. The daily lives of its older adults closely match the advantages and disadvantages experienced by urban elders in other developed countries. For these reasons, Hong Kong s elderly serve as a salient guide to older people s social, psychological, and healthcare needs concerns of increasing importance as the world grows older.

"Aging in Hong Kong" examines this emblematic population as a case study specifically in comparison with their counterparts in the West, shedding light on diverse, interrelated currents in the aging experience. Referencing numerous international studies, the book contrasts different health service arrangements and social factors and relates them to a variety of health outcomes. Its wide-ranging coverage documents health and illness trends, reviews age-friendly policy initiatives, relates health literacy to patients active role in their own care, and discusses elders as an underserved group in the division of limited health funding and resources. This multiple focus draws readers attention to policies that need revisiting or retooling as chapters analyze major life areas including:

Living environment.Retirement and post-retirement employment issues.Financial asset management.Health literacy regarding aging issues.Elder-positive service delivery models.Ageism in the prioritization of healthcare.End-of-life issues.

By assembling such a wealth of data on its subject, "Aging in Hong Kong" puts ongoing challenges into clear focus for gerontologists, sociologists, health and cross-cultural psychologists, public health policymakers, and others involved in improving the quality of elders lives."

Population ageing has been going on for many decades, but population shrinking is a rather new phenomenon. The population of Germany, as in many other countries, has passed a plateau and is currently shrinking. Demographic change is a challenge for infrastructure planning due to the longevity of infrastructure capital and the need to match supply and demand in order to ensure cost-efficiency. This book summarises the findings of the INFRADEM project team, a multidisciplinary research group that worked together to estimate the effects of demographic change on infrastructure demand. Economists, engineers and geographers present studies from top-down and bottom-up perspectives, focusing on Germany and two selected regions: Hamburg and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The contributors employed a broad range of methods, including an overlapping-generations model for Germany, regional input-output models, an energy systems model, and a spatial model of the transportation infrastructure.

During the 1990s, Naples' left-wing administration sought to tackle the city's infamous reputation of being poor, crime-ridden, chaotic and dirty by reclaiming the city's cultural and architectural heritage. This book examines the conflicts surrounding the reimaging and reordering of the city's historic centre through detailed case studies of two piazzas and a centro sociale, focusing on a series of issues that include heritage, decorum, security, pedestrianization, tourism, immigration and new forms of urban protest. This monograph is the first in-depth study of the complex transformations of one of Europe's most fascinating and misunderstood cities. It represents a new critical approach to the questions of public space, citizenship and urban regeneration as well as a broader methodological critique of how we write about contemporary cities.

This book contains a systematic study of ecological communities of two or three interacting populations. Starting from the Lotka-Volterra system, various regulating factors are considered, such as rates of birth and death, predation and competition. The different factors can have a stabilizing or a destabilizing effect on the community, and their interplay leads to increasingly complicated behavior. Studying and understanding this path to greater dynamical complexity of ecological systems constitutes the backbone of this book. On the mathematical side, the tool of choice is the qualitative theory of dynamical systems - most importantly bifurcation theory, which describes the dependence of a system on the parameters. This approach allows one to find general patterns of behavior that are expected to be observed in ecological models. Of special interest is the reaction of a given model to disturbances of its present state, as well as to changes in the external conditions. This leads to the general idea of "dangerous boundaries" in the state and parameter space of an ecological system. The study of these boundaries allows one to analyze and predict qualitative and often sudden changes of the dynamics - a much-needed tool, given the increasing antropogenic load on the biosphere.As a spin-off from this approach, the book can be used as a guided tour of bifurcation theory from the viewpoint of application. The interested reader will find a wealth of intriguing examples of how known bifurcations occur in applications. The book can in fact be seen as bridging the gap between mathematical biology and bifurcation theory.

The main demographic revoulution in modern history has been the increased survival of children - the gradual elimination of the biological waste linked to the high mortality of the past. This volume examines the trends of early-age mortality across time and space and the methodological and theoretical problems inherent in such studies. It widens the discussion beyond the standard European focus by including data from Asian and American sources, showing that they offer enormous potential for researchers. At the same time, it makes clear the need for cautious treatment of historical data and points towards the design of techniques for appraising their quality, correcting distortions, and filling gaps. The analysis demonstrates that levels of infant and child mortality are linked not only to material conditions of life but also to social and cultural factors. The authors argue that a better understanding of these interactions can only come from an interdisciplinary approach, where demography joins forces with biology, medicine, public health, and social and economic history.

In the past forty years an entirely new paradigm has developed regarding the contact population of the New World. Proponents of this new theory argue that the American Indian population in 1492 was ten, even twenty, times greater than previous estimates. In Numbers From Nowhere David Henige argues that the data on which these high counts are based are meager and often demonstrably wrong.

Drawing on a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, Henige illustrates the use and abuse of numerical data throughout history. He shows that extrapolation of numbers is entirely subjective, however masked it may be by arithmetic, and he questions what constitutes valid evidence in historical and scientific scholarship.

"This is the book that market strategists have been waiting for to position themselves in global markets and take advantage of the opportunities that demographic bonuses and deficits offer to them and their products. It is also a book for teachers and students of consumer behaviour to grasp the importance of the life cycle as a framework that shapes the demand for goods and services determined by changes in social, economic and physical functioning. It gives insights into gendered consumer behaviour and cohort effects. It presents a range of views on consumer behaviour and how demographic perspectives enhance these perspectives. The book offers conceptual and analytical tools that can be used in the assessment of population characteristics as determinants of market size, composition and potential for a variety of products. It offers organising frameworks as well as empirical evidence of consumer behaviour in clusters of markets, with different rates of population growth and age distribution that affect consumers' priorities and demand for basic and progressive commodities. The book shows commonalities as well as differences in consumer behaviour arising from different cultures and social customs. It uses analytical tools that are explained and accessible to readers with a range of competences. It is a book that can give a better understanding of consumer behaviour and market opportunities to the practitioner. It can also be used for the instruction of students in demography, consumer behaviour and marketing. ""

This is a timely book written in the temporal and political context of the British New Labour Government's ongoing reliance on the word "community." Its key focus is on understanding community from action into theory and theory into action. Academics and activists engage critically with the range of ways in which contemporary ideas of community are being used and contested, examining the current theoretical and practical challenges of building and sustaining convincing senses of community in national and trans-national contexts. Contributions are organised into three thematic sections--Locating community, Justice within and between communities and Building health communities.

In The Human Dichotomy, John Clarke discusses how the ratio between the numbers of males and females will change in the future.
Scientific and technological advances, accompanied by social and economic change, are affecting the number of births, the number of deaths and the mobility of the two sexes, with the prospect of further dramatic changes in store. What impact will this have on the lot of women and girls world-wide? Will changes in the ratio of male to female births mean that the traditional son preference will begin to break down?
Professor Clarke looks at how medical interventions and the looming prospect of sex selection at birth will affect the rough balances in the numbers of men and women. As well as these so-called 'natural' changes, the numerical balances of the two sexes in most parts of the world is being greatly transformed by a revolution in female mobility. How 'natural' changes in population and increased mobility in the 21st century will affect the geographical distribution in the numerical balance of the sexes is a key theme of this book.
Addressing a significant gap in the literature, The Human Dichotomy provides case studies from across the world on the problems associated with the changing balances of births, deaths and mobility of the two sexes. Issues discussed include patterns of sex ratios, sex-selective abortions, sex-differential mortality in more developed and less developed countries, marriage and widowhood, and gendered migration.

This book is the first comprehensive assessment of the mortality crisis which has affected most economies in transition but which has remained so far largely unexplained. It reconciles long-term and short-term explanations of the crisis and makes use of special micro data-sets never used before. By providing a rigorous multidisciplinary analysis of this upsurge in mortality rates, the book hopes to contribute to the launch of vigorous policies to tackle this societal problem.

EDITORS NIDI, P.O. Box 11650, 2502 AR The Hague, The Netherlands CBGS, Markiesstraat 1, 1000 Brussels, Belgium This volume is the tenth edition in the series "Population and Family in the Low Countries." It is published by the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demo graphic Institute (NIDI, The Hague) together with the Flemish Population and Family Study Centre (CBGS, Brussels), with the purpose to inform an international audience on results of demographic research in Belgium and the Netherlands. The series started in 1976. From 1991 on, it is published annually. The current edition includes seven articles reflecting a selection of current research issues in the Low Countries. With permission of the Dutch and Belgian Governments the national reports submitted to the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (Cai'ro) are also included in this volume. They provide up to date information on the official views at present of the Dutch and Belgian Government on demographic trends and population policy issues."

In this innovative historical survey, Annegret S. Ogden addresses the need for the modern housewife to adapt to the additional role of wage earner. By examining a variety of diaries, letters, domestic fiction, and household books of the past two centuries, as well as solid statistical and historical data, she seeks not only to uncover the motivations and origins of the typical American housewife, but also to discover an alternative life pattern that has characterized a virtually unrecognized minority of American women. These are the immigrant, black, and frontier women, as well as any other part-time homemakers, who long ago forged the survival tools that are needed by today's majority of working housewives. It is Ogden's contention that an understanding of the historical housewife, as well as her working counterpart, will light the way for those modern American housewives who must adapt their role as both homemaker and wage earner to the shifting complexities of contemporary American life.

Most people (including moral philosophers), when faced with the fact that some of their cherished moral views lead up to the Repugnant Conclusion, feel that they have to revise their moral outlook. However, it is a moot question as to how this should be done. It is not an easy thing to say how one should avoid the Repugnant Conclusion, without having to face even more serious implications from one's basic moral outlook. Several such attempts are presented in this volume. This is the first volume devoted entirely to the cardinal problem of modern population ethics, known as 'The Repugnant Conclusion'.

This book is a must for (moral) philosophers with an interest in population ethics.

Many industrialized countries are facing large problems with their public pension systems in the 21st century. An unfavourable age distribution, with lower population shares in working ages and increasing shares and numbers of elderly persons in the future will lead, under current pension systems, to a drop in contributions and at the same time to sharply rising amounts of benefits paid. This book analyzes the impact of dynamics in age structure and marital status composition on future public pension expenditures in twelve industrialized countries. It shows that there is no demographic response to population ageing at the horizon 2030. Neither an increase in fertility nor an inflow of migrants can rejuvenate national populations, unless fertility and/or migration reach unrealistically high levels. Therefore, the overall conclusion of this book is that demographic variables are of limited help to relieve the burden of future public pension expenditures. Substantial reductions of the public pension burden have to be sought in socioeconomic measures, and not in adjusting demographic conditions. The book includes various demographic and pension scenarios for pension costs in the coming decades for Austria, Canada, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Sweden. Not only old age pensions, but also disability and survivor pensions have been investigated. Variant projections were calculated for changes in demographic, labour force, and pension system variables. In addition, separate case studies for three countries deal with: a pension system in Austria in which benefits depend on the number children ever born; the impact of household dynamics on social security in the Netherlands, not just marriage and marriage dissolution; and with the consequences of economic growth for public pensions in Sweden.

Twelve population scientists address the questions: What are the major changes that occurred in the 1980s? What created these changes? What major consequences result from these changes for the present and for the future? Included are chapters that give theoretical explanations of social change, discuss the social and ecological effects of high population density, and show the change in population composition, fertility and mortality rates, and migration patterns. In addition to these traditional demographic concerns, the work also provides insights into community redevelopment, poverty, changing family patterns, and ethnic identification.

With the emergence of fertility declines in the greater part of the developing world, study of the phenomenon has increased profoundly over the last three decades, and a voluminous amount of literature has emerged. Yet our knowledge of the decline is scattered in numerous publications, making sources difficult to find. This bibliography provides a guide to the literature on fertility decline in Latin America, Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. It will be an invaluable asset for population experts and students wishing to do research on fertility decline. Covering the literature from 1960 to 1997, the book draws on extensive sources including books, articles in leading population journals, research papers, and dissertations. The opening chapter covers the literature on theories and concepts underlying fertility decline. The next three chapters are devoted to the major geographical areas--Latin America, Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa--and the final chapter looks at general literature on fertility declines in developing countries.

All humans eventually die, but life expectancies differ over time and among different demographic groups. Teasing out the various causes and correlates of death is a challenge, and it is one we take on in this book. A look at the data on mortality is both interesting and suggestive of some possible relationships. In 1900 life expectancies at birth were 46. 3 and 48. 3 years for men and women respectively, a gender differential of a bit less than 5 percent. Life expectancies for whites then were about 0. 3 years longer than that of the whole population, but life expectancies for blacks were only about 33 years for men and women. At age 65, the remaining life expectancies were about 12 and 11 years for whites and blacks respectively. Fifty years later, life expectancies at birth had grown to 66 and 71 years for males and females respectively. The percentage differential between the sexes was now almost up to 10 percent. The life expectancies of whites were about one year longer than that for the entire population. The big change was for blacks, whose life expectancy had grown to over 60 years with black females living about 5 percent longer than their male counterparts. At age 65 the remaining expected life had increased about two years with much larger percentage gains for blacks.

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In 1926/27 the Soviet Central Statistical Administration initiated several yearlong expeditions to gather primary data on the whereabouts, economy and living conditions of all rural peoples living in the Arctic and sub-Arctic at the end of the Russian civil war. Due partly to the enthusiasm of local geographers and ethnographers, the Polar Census grew into a massive ethnological exercise, gathering not only basic demographic and economic data on every household but also a rich archive of photographs, maps, kinship charts, narrative transcripts and museum artifacts. To this day, it remains one of the most comprehensive surveys of a rural population anywhere. The contributors to this volume OCo all noted scholars in their region OCo have conducted long-term fieldwork with the descendants of the people surveyed in 1926/27. This volume is the culmination of eight yearsOCO work with the primary record cards and was supported by a number of national scholarly funding agencies in the UK, Canada and Norway. It is a unique historical, ethnographical analysis and of immense value to scholars familiar with these communitiesOCO contemporary cultural dynamics and legacy."

When researchers want to study indigenous populations they are dependent upon the highly variable way in which states or territories enumerate, categorise and differentiate indigenous people. In this volume, anthropologists, historians, demographers and sociologists have come together for the first time to examine the historical and contemporary construct of indigenous people in a number of fascinating geographical contexts around the world, including Canada, the United States, Colombia, Russia, Scandinavia, the Balkans and Australia. Using historical and demographical evidence, the contributors explore the creation and validity of categories for enumerating indigenous populations, the use and misuse of ethnic markers, micro-demographic investigations, and demographic databases, and thereby show how the situation varies substantially between countries.