This book examines the impacts of China's urbanization on the country's economic development, clan culture, rural societies, minority resident areas, natural environment, women, and public policy reforms, drawing on official statistics, independent survey data, archives, and fieldwork research to do so. Adopting a cross-disciplinary perspective, the book places special emphasis on issues that have been neglected in prior studies, and provides up-to-date information, reports, and analyses based on the latest events. Further, it considers future directions and strategies regarding urban development, discusses regional urbanization in selected poor and "backward" western provinces, analyzes changes in traditional clan culture brought on by urbanization, and explores evolutions in local clan societies in the Qin and Han Dynasties when cities expanded and business flourished. Lastly, the book examines the effects of infrastructure-related determinants on urban expansion rates and urban land prices, demonstrates the ebbs and flows of public opinion regarding various environmental issues, discusses planned real estate tax reform, and assesses the impact of demographic and socioeconomic changes on young unmarried women.

Covering the entire period since the Norman conquest, this history charts the magnitude and characteristics of population change in England since the 11th century. It describes the major explanations for population change which have been proposed by historians over the years, and introduces the main historical sources which have been used to analyse the population history of England. Our knowledge of the population history of England has been transformed since the 1960s by the research of historians and demographers. The book emphasizes throughout the process by which ideas and evidence interact to create knowledge, using the full range of research tools. It assumes no prior knowledge of technical demography and the few technical terms and concepts which are used are clearly explained. Three appendices describe the main documentary sources and how they can be exploited to yield vital demographic data. The book should appeal to anyone interested in how our ancestors lived: how they were born, grew up, courted, married, had children and died. It should also be useful to students taking courses in English population history and society.

'Superbly explained' Washington Post 'Fascinating' Sunday Times 'Engrossing' Evening Standard Every phase since the advent of the industrial revolution - from the fate of the British Empire, to the global challenges from Germany, Japan and Russia, to America's emergence as a sole superpower, to the Arab Spring, to the long-term decline of economic growth that started with Japan and has now spread to Europe, to China's meteoric economy, to Brexit and the presidency of Donald Trump - can be explained better when we appreciate the meaning of demographic change across the world.The Human Tide is the first popular history book to redress the underestimated influence of population as a crucial factor in almost all of the major global shifts and events of the last two centuries - revealing how such events are connected by the invisible mutually catalysing forces of population. This highly original history offers a brilliant and simple unifying theory for our understanding the last two hundred years: the power of sheer numbers. An ambitious, original, magisterial history of modernity, it taps into prominent preoccupations of our day and will transform our perception of history for many years to come.

This edited volume offers state-of-the-art research on the dynamics of contemporary fertility by examining the implications of the economic and social forces that are driving the rapid change in fertility behavior, and the changing context, determinants, and measurement of contemporary human reproduction. The volume explores new theoretical avenues that seek to incorporate uncertainty, examine social contagion effects, and explain the rise in childlessness. Reproductive attitudes are re-examined in chapters that deal with models of parenthood and with the persistence of race-ethnic-nativity differences. A new and important subject of multi-partner fertility is also described by examining it in the context of total fertility and from the usually neglected perspective of men. The impact of divorce on fertility, the measurement of childlessness and the postponement of first births, developments in assortative mating and fertility, and current patterns of interracial fertility are also addressed in this volume. By combining up-to-date research spanning the entire field to illuminate contemporary developments, the book is a valuable source for demographers, sociologists, economists, and all those interested in understanding fertility in today's world.

Inequality is one of the major problems of the contemporary world. Significant geographical disparities exist within nations of the developed world, as well as between these countries and those referred to as the 'South' in the Bruntland Report. Issues of equity and deprivation must be addressed in view of sustainable development. However, before policymakers can remove the obstacles to a fairer world, it is essential to understand the nature of inequality, both in terms of its spatial and socio-demographic characteristics.

This second volume in the series contains population studies that examine the disparities evident across geographical space in the UK and between different individuals or groups. Topics include demographic and social change, deprivation, happiness, cultural consumption, ethnicity, gender, employment, health, religion, education and social values. These topics and the relationships between them are explored using secondary data from censuses, surveys or administrative records.

In volume 1 the findings of research on fertility, living arrangements, care and mobility are examined. Volume 3 will focus on ethnicity and integration.

This open access book provides a unique research perspective on life course transitions. Here, transitions are understood as social processes and practices. Leveraging the recent "practice turn" in the social sciences, the contributors analyze how life course transitions are "done." This book introduces the concept of "doing transitions" and its implications for theories and methods. It presents fresh empirical research on "doing transitions" in different life phases (e.g., childhood, young adulthood, later life) and life domains (e.g., education, work, family, health, migration). It also emphasizes themes related to institutions and organizations, time and normativity, materialities (such as bodies, spaces, and artifacts), and the reproduction of social inequalities in education and welfare. In coupling this new perspective with empirical illustrations, this book is an indispensable resource for scholars from demography, sociology, psychology, social work and other scientific fields, as well as for students, counselors and practitioners, and policymakers.

As the leading edge of the 'Baby Boom' generation attains age 60, members of this unusually large cohort born 1946-66 are poised to redefine retirement - just as they have restructured educational, housing, and labor markets in prior days. Looking ahead, their numbers and energy are sure to have a major impact on national pensions, healthcare, and social safety nets. Contributors to this volume note that 'Boomers' will be better off than their predecessors in many ways, having benefited from the long run-up in housing prices, dramatic improvements in healthcare, and the expanding economy. On the other hand, the generation's sheer size will surely squeeze resources and require new approaches to retirement risk management. This volume paints a complex and fascinating picture as Boomers move into retirement. On average they are in better financial and physical health than prior cohorts, and they can be anticipated to fare better than current retirees in absolute terms. Yet the distribution of retiree income and wealth will be less equal than in earlier years, and in relative terms, many Boomers will be less well off than their forebears. Contributors to the volume use many invaluable models and datasets, including the incomparable Health and Retirement Study (HRS) which affords unique insights into the status of mature adults surveyed at the same age and hence same point in their life cycles, but at three different time periods. Analysts offer new evidence about prospects for health and income during retirement, as well as pensions and housing equity, health, portfolio allocation, and financial literacy. This book offers readers an invaluable and first book-length study of Boomers as they march into retirement. As such, it represents an invaluable addition to the Pension Research Council/Oxford University Press series. It will be especially useful for scholars and policymakers seeking to understand retirement preparedness, to actuaries and tax specialists concerned with retirement system regulation, and to plan sponsors interested in the determinants of work and retirement at older ages.

China, the world's most populous nation, will enter a period of rapid aging very shortly that will redefine that country. Between 2010 and 2040, the portion of people 65 and older will rise from around 7% to between 25 and 30% of the population. As China ages, can it retain the youthful dynamism now driving it? China, the world's most populous nation, will enter a period of rapid aging very shortly that will redefine that country. Between 2010 and 2040, the number of people 65 and older will rise from around 7% to between 25 and 30% of the population. As China ages, can it retain the youthful dynamism now driving it? This book is an effort to try to capture the broad outlines of the significant economic, market, social, and demographic factors that will shape the future of China and the role that aging will play in the whole mix of influences. Aging in developed societies and economies has been widely studied. In such nations as Japan, Germany, Italy, and Spain, for example, we know that as populations age, their societies decline, leaving fewer younger workers to support the growing number of people who will become dependent on costly health care systems, or whose basic needs, such as food and shelter, will need to be subsidized. But less work has been done in assessing the potential impact of aging in developing countries, where the majority of people may be working poor, not middle class-as in the case of China. As China restructures its economy, the old benefits packages previously available to urban workers (and not rural workers) are being replaced by a patchwork of benefits across a wide range of enterprises.

This edited collection investigates what progress has been made in the field of social demography in South Africa since the democratic dispensation in the country. Contributors offer a compilation of in-depth analytical studies of substantive, technical and contemporary issues in the South African demographic landscape. Accessible and topical, it is a useful reference guide to those working in disciplines such as sociology, geography, statistics and economics, and to all those trying to understand the role of national statistical agency in national development planning in Africa. This book project is funded by Statistics South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa.

The Chinese economy is undergoing dramatic changes and the world is watching and changing along with it. The Chinese family is also changing in many ways in response to the economic transformation that is moving the world's most populous nation from an agrarian economy to a global superpower. This is the first book in English to describe and explain the social transformation of the Chinese family from the perspective of Chinese researchers. Presenting a comprehensive view of the Chinese family today and how it has adapted during the process of modernization, it provides description and analysis of the trajectory of changes in family structures, functions, and relationships. It tracks how Chinese marriages and families are becoming more diverse and face a great deal of uncertainty as they evolve in different ways from Western marriages and families. The book is also unique in its use of national statistics and data from large-scale surveys to systematically illustrate these radical and extraordinary changes in family structure and dynamics over the past 30 years. Demonstrating that the de-institutionalization of family values is a slow process in the Chinese context, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese Studies, Sociology, Social Policy and Family Policy.

The first India Migration Report proposed by the Research Unit on International Migration set up by the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs, Government of India at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala is organised into articles on four broad themes: migration, remittances, gender, and policy issues. The opening article reviews the historical trends in international migration, followed by two articles that deal with workers' remittances and one which discusses the maturity that Kerala emigration reached in this state. Other articles focus on cross-border migration in developing countries, and as yet less documented gender issues, including the migration of nurses and housemaids. Though large numbers of unskilled and semi-skilled labourers migrate to the Gulf region, the prevailing labour laws and the violation of human rights in the GCC countries are an unexplored area; this is something this volume also addresses. The cost of migration and the role played by unscrupulous recruitments agents are serious concerns for both the government and international agencies working in migration. The Emigration Act 1983 provides guidelines for organising recruitment business in India. Do we have to revamp the recruitment system? These are some of the themes this book discusses.

The collection of chapters in the "Handbook of Population and Family Economics" and their organization reflect the most recent developments in economics pertaining to population issues and the family. The rationale, contents, and organization of the "Handbook" evolve from three premises. First, the family is the main arena in which population outcomes are forged. Second, there are important interactions and significant causal links across all demographic phenomena. Third, the study of the size, composition, and growth of a population can benefit from the application of economic methodology and tools. The diversity and depth of the work reviewed and presented in the "Handbook" conveys both the progress that has been made by economists in understanding the forces shaping population processes, including the behavior of families, and the many questions, empirical and theoretical, that still remain. For more information on the Handbooks in Economics series, please see our home page on http: //www.elsevier.nl/locate/hes

"Key Demographics in Retirement Risk Management" argues that the weakening of public and employer-sponsored social safety nets in several countries will permanently increase pre-retirees' risk-anxiety and create pressure towards readjustment of their expectations about the quality of their lives in retirement. The result will be to raise the priority of achieving effective comprehensive retirement related risk management. This achievement requires an emphasis upon the cascading of linked risks, and careful attention to the optimization of scarce resources used to manage those linked risks. Professional financial and retirement planning advisors comprise a key source of help. This book develops new knowledge concerning the factors that help to explain three important aspects of access to these professional advisors. The results of this analysis are used to illustrate the process of identifying distinctive population segments, key demographics, on the basis of multiple population attributes treated simultaneously. The illustration is further extended with an identification of distinctive population segments relative to performance on a composite indicator of the conduct of multiple retirement risk management activities. The book also discusses implications of the pattern of gender differences in preparedness to address retirement's challenges, highlighting subgroups of women in which inadequate preparedness is pronounced. "

Locational research has long been concerned with industrial plants and the site selection of retail stores. The major determinants and decision processes now seem to be fairly well understood. Con sequently, the research frontier in retailing has shifted to a higher spatial level, the location of stores in the regional and national context. Certainly, stores tend to be found where the population is, but beyond this obvious truth it is by no means outright clear how retailing companies with different formats and home bases perceive space and how space affects their performance, if at all. When the question is put this way, what appears trivial at first undergoes a change and seems now complex enough to be worth a closer look. It need not be true, to cite the most obvious of examples, that regions which are attractive as places of living for high-school and college students, the custom ary data base, are also worthwhile from the business point of view. No attempt is made here to pen etrate the topic at analytical depth. The ambition is simply to discover, with the help of numerous descriptive examples, whether any order does exist in the high-level spatial behavior of retailing companies."

This volume explores, in various ways, the connections between reproductive health and culture. Individual chapters range over two broad questions. How does culture shape the particular ways in which reproductive events are associated with health outcomes? And to what extent does the notion of reproductive health, which emerged at a historical moment and was moulded by the experience of specific groups, have relevance in different circumstances?

International efforts to regulate fertility rates so that populations do not grow beyond the earth's capacity have included technical assistance and capital; improved health care conditions to lower the risk of infant mortality; increased opportunities to develop literacy; the democratization of governments; and several decades of liberal immigration and refugee policies favoring third world nations. The persistence of high fertility despite international efforts confounds demographers. 'Population Politics' brilliantly dissects the paradigm responsible for the counterproductive efforts of nations and international agencies. Abernethy, a renowned anthropologist, shows why policies hamper the shift to lower fertility. Ireland, Indonesia, Cuba, China, Turkey and Egypt are but a few of the countries Abernethy examines, showing how economic, sociocultural, and agricultural factors that have caused population growth can be harnessed to stabilize population size. 'Population Politics' is a provocative examination of the influence of aid and liberal immigration policies on world population growth, and often counterproductive to the role of the United States as an industrial power. This volume's uniquely interdisciplinary perspective will enlighten the lay reader, as well as demographers and epidemiologists, conservationists, reproduction and family specialists, agricultural economists, and public health personnel. Virginia D. Abernethy is professor emeritus of psychiatry (anthropology) at Vanderbilt Medical School and was for 11 years the editor of the scholarly journal 'Population and Environment. Garrett Hardin is emeritus professor of human ecology in the Department of Biological Sciences and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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.

In the coming decades, challenges and risks associated with rapid population ageing will be paramount in Asia-Pacific. Examining key trends, dilemmas and developments with reference to specific nations, the book draws conclusions and policy recommendations that apply to Asia-Pacific as a whole. Individual chapters focus on the impact of population ageing, along with urbanization and industrialization, on the lives of people in the region. The book shows how leaders in Asia-Pacific - political, community and others - need to respond to changes in family and social structures, disease pathology, gender roles, income security, the care of older citizens and the provision of social and health welfare.

Five years after the first edition of Millennials, News, and Social Media: Is News Engagement a Thing of the Past? was published, a focus on the Millennial generation's relationship with news is more important than ever. This revised and updated book reports the results of a new survey that reveals changes in news consumption habits and attitudes while painting a detailed portrait of Millennials in a news media landscape now dominated by social media and mobile devices. Generational, racial, ethnic, and gender differences in news engagement and social media use are examined and so is the historic presidential election that the oldest and youngest Millennials experienced. How Millennials voted, the issues that mattered, and the relationship between their political identity and news is also explored. The spread of fake news, attacks on the press, and the need for news literacy are also discussed. Since the publication of the book's first edition, Snapchat and digital subscriptions have emerged and social media sites have become popular platforms for news. How Millennials have responded to these changes in the media landscape is also examined. Finally, recommendations for further improvement of news coverage of Millennials are proposed. Plus, the book underscores how all segments of society, including news organizations, journalism schools, and tech companies, can work toward a more informed and news literate society, a requirement for viable democracies. This revised and updated book will appeal to students, scholars, journalists, and everyone who cares about informed and civically engaged citizens and a strong democracy.

This study lies at the intersection of three principal areas of social history: demography, religion, and quantitative methods. It is a microanalysis of an English population at the level of the Anglican parish, during the era of the evangelical revival, which includes, unusually, Protestant dissenters from the Established church, in this case Particular Baptists, who were moderate Calvinists. It goes a step beyond previous studies by giving Anglicans and Dissenters co-equal status in a comparative demographic analysis and by demonstrating how religious values informed procreative activity. It does so through a combination of advanced statistical methodologies and an innovative treatment of data collection forms as readable texts. The study concludes that the likelihood of another birth increased following a religious conversion experience, especially among both Anglican and Baptist wives following marriage. Mortality too had a less constraining effect on procreative activity which, in conformity with the English experience, was driven largely by fertility.

The social sciences share a mission to shed light on human nature and society. However, there is no widely accepted meta-theory; no foundation from which variables can be linked, causally sequenced, or ultimately explained. This book advances "life history evolution" as the missing meta-theory for the social sciences. Originally a biological theory for the variation between species, research on life history evolution now encompasses psychological and sociological variation within the human species that has long been the stock and trade of social scientific study. The eighteen chapters of this book review six disciplines, eighteen authors, and eighty-two volumes published between 1734 and 2015-re-reading the texts in the light of life history evolution.

The economics of population has a long and controversial history as well as an exciting present. Vociferous popular debate, public policy, and population economics have unduly influenced one another: public debate and policy affect the erection of economists' conclusions just as the results of economists' studies influence debate and popular thought. The words and theories of John Maynard Keynes, Thomas R. Malthus, John Stuart Mill, and Friedrich Engels come to mind immediately. However, many writings on population economics had little or no influence on public thought at the time they were written, although they may be seen as "correct" in light of modern developments. In fact, many of the ideas contained in these writings were publicly debated but then ignored for a long time, reappearing much later or reinvented independently. The Economics of Population, edited by Julian L. Simon, traces the history of population economics. This is a century-spanning collection of essays from foremost influential economic theorists, arranged to illustrate thought development and its numerous reversals. The first section includes essays from Joseph J. Spengler, John Graunt, William Petty, Thomas R. Malthus, William Godwin, and David Ricardo. Theorists such as Alexander Everett, William Peterson, Simon Gray, Henry C. Carey, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Engels, Henry George, and Charles Fourier are the subject of the volume's second section. Finally, Simon covers the effect of population density and cities on productivity, and the effect of density on agricultural practices and natural resources. Essays from this section include John Maynard Keynes' "Is Britain Overpopulated?" and "The Economic Consequences of Peace" as well as selections from Lionel Robbins, George Simmel, and Alvin H. Hansen. Simon's long-term focus reflects the evolution of population movements. He does not restrict himself to writings that have been important in the historical chain of intellectual influence. Rather, he guides us to key works which shed light on the intellectual history of population economics. Simon includes some essays that, while greatly influential, can also be seen as fundamentally wrong in light of later work. As such, The Economics of Population will be of great value to political economists, sociologists of knowledge, and historians of ideas.

This book depicts the evolution of Singapore's family and population landscape in the last half a century, the related public policies, and future challenges. Since the country gained independence in 1965, family and population policies have been integral to her nation-building strategies. The chapters discuss the changes in population compositions, family structures, relations, and values among major ethnic groups. They also discuss policies for vulnerable populations such as female-headed households, cross-cultural families, same-sex partnering, the elderly, and low-income families.

"This a much-welcome addition to the modern English-language reference library on Siberian indigenous people and the first book-size effort to address their plight and status from the perspective of the Russian archival statistical and documentary records of the early 1900s. It is an outcome of a monumental collaborative project." . Igor Krupnik, Smithsonian Institution

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 - all noted scholars in their region - have conducted long-term fieldwork with the descendants of the people surveyed in 1926/27. This volume is the culmination of eight years' 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 communities' contemporary cultural dynamics and legacy."

China is aging at an extraordinary speed and has the largest quantity of elderly persons in the world. Scholars utilize this unprecedented living experience of human being and the unique Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey (CLHLS) datasets with the aim to answer in this volume the following questions critical to the aging population world wide. Is the period of disability compressing or expanding with increasing life expectancy and what factors are associated with these trends in the recent decades? Is it possible to realize morbidity compression with a prolongation of the life span in the future? The first section of the book presents the CLHLS project's study design, sample distribution, contents of data collected, and assessments of age reporting and data quality. The remaining chapters are grouped into sections dealing with the demographic, social, economic, familial and psychological dimensions of healthy longevity.