Back to Home page
17 POPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT REVIEW, December 1998, Vol. 24, N° 4
Malthus and the less developed world: The pivotal role of India.
Malthus's Essay had a powerful influence on how English-speaking people interpreted population issues. This was particularly true with regard to India, Britain's huge colony, which, unlike other large agrarian countries of the less developed world, was progressively described by census statistics and other demographic observations. Its administrators and civil servants, both British and Indian, increasingly saw it in Malthusian terms. This tradition persisted into the twentieth century and played a powerful role in the establishment of national family planning programs in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and beyond. In turn the British experience in India helped to shape the attitudes of the English-speaking peoples to poor, densely populated countries and rapid population growth.
English - pp. 675-696.
J. C. Caldwell, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.
(INDIA, UNITED KINGDOM, MALTHUSIANISM, COLONIAL COUNTRIES, FAMILY PLANNING PROGRAMMES, POPULATION POLICY.)
*****
00.17.2 - BEHRMAN, Jere R.; KNOWLES, James C.
Population and reproductive health: An economic framework for policy evaluation.
This article provides a standard economic framework to evaluate policies in the population and reproductive health fields and illustrates its use in order to facilitate cross-disciplinary exchanges between economists and others working in these areas. This framework justifies policy interventions to increase efficiency and productivity and to redistribute resources. The article illustrates this framework with a cost-benefit analysis of a safe motherhood project in Indonesia and a distributional analysis of family planning and reproductive health services in Vietnam. Application of the policy framework to a number of resource and finance issues in population and reproductive health suggests that a significant program bias favors publicly provided services and hinders the emergence of a more efficient mix of private and public providers competing on an equal basis.
English - pp. 697-737.
J. R. Behrman, University of Pennsylvania, U.S.A.
(POPULATION POLICY, MATERNAL AND CHILD HEALTH, PROGRAMME EVALUATION, ECONOMIC ANALYSIS, METHODOLOGY.)
*****
00.17.3 - TIMMER, Ashley S.; WILLIAMSON, Jeffrey G.
Immigration policy prior to the 1930s: Labor markets, policy interactions, and globalization backlash.
What determines immigration policy? The literature here is not nearly as mature as that for trade policy, so this article must be viewed as an initial effort to establish the main empirical outlines. The authors construct an index of immigration policy for five countries of immigration--Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, and the United States--for 18601930, that is, during and shortly after the age of mass migration. The exercise reveals that the doors to the New World did not suddenly slam shut on immigrants after World War I, as is typically illustrated by citing the passage of the Emergency Quota Act by the US Congress in 1921. Instead, there was a gradual closing of the doors, although the rate and timing of the closing varied across countries. The authors find that poor wage performance and the perceived threat from more, low-quality foreign workers were the main influences on shifts in immigration policy. They also offer some support for the idea that immigration policy was as much an interactive process as were the tariff policies of the time.
English - pp. 739-771.
A. S. Timmer, Duke University, U.S.A.
(AMERICA, IMMIGRATION POLICY, HISTORY.)
*****
00.17.4 - SATHAR, Zeba A.; CASTERLINE, John B.
The onset of fertility transition in Pakistan.
Recent trends in fertility and contraceptive prevalence indicate that the fertility transition in Pakistan has begun in the 1990s. Before that decade, the total fertility rate had exceeded six births per woman for at least three decades, and fewer than 10 percent of married women practiced contraception. The most recent survey data, collected in 199697, show a total fertility rate of 5.3 births per woman and a contraceptive prevalence rate of 24 percent. Underlying this development are macroeconomic trends that have led to widespread economic distress at the household level, and social changes that have diluted the influence of extended kin and resulted in greater husbandwife convergence in reproductive decisionmaking. The direct causes of declining fertility are a crystallization of existing desires for smaller families, along with a decline in family size desires and a reduction in the social, cultural, and psychic costs of contraception. Improvements in family planning services have contributed little to the onset of fertility decline but could be decisive in sustaining the decline over the next decade.
English - pp. 773-796.
Z. A. Sathar, Population Council, Islamabad, Pakistan.
(PAKISTAN, FERTILITY DECLINE, FERTILITY DECLINE, CONTRACEPTIVE USAGE.)
*****
00.17.5 - ENCHAUTEGUI, María E.
Low-skilled immigrants and the changing American labor market.
Low-skilled immigrants are an integral part of the US labor market: almost 30 percent of US workers without a high school diploma are immigrants. If current trends persist, immigrants will become the majority of US low-skilled workers in the near future. While low-skilled immigrants maintain strong employment levels, they are concentrated in the most menial low-skilled jobs, and their wages are declining relative to those of natives. The substantial deterioration of the economic status of low-skilled immigrants in the last decade raises important policy questions concerning ways to address the plight of this growing segment of US workers.
English - pp. 811-824.
M. E. Enchautegui, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, Puerto Rico.
(UNITED STATES, IMMIGRANT WORKERS, UNSKILLED WORKERS, SOCIO-ECONOMIC STATUS, POVERTY.)
*****
17 POPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT REVIEW, March 1999, Vol. 25, N° 1
00.17.6 - ASTONE, Nan Marie; NATHANSON, Constance A.; SCHOEN, Robert; KIM, Young J.
Family demography, social theory, and investment in social capital.
The analytic models used by family demographers would be strengthened by the concept of social capital, placed in the context of social exchange theory. Using that concept to designate resources that emerge from social ties, the authors advance five propositions: 1) social capital is a multidimensional attribute of an individual; 2) the dimensions of social capital are the number of relationships a person has, their quality (strength), and the resources available through those relationships; 3) group membership and interaction facilitate the development of social capital; 4) the structural properties of groups influence the development of social capital; and 5) the acquisition and maintenance of social capital is a major motivator of human behavior. The formation of sexual partnerships, the birth and rearing of children, and both intragenerational and intergenerational transfers constitute major forms of investment in social capital in virtually all societies.
English - pp. 1-31.
N. M. Astone, Department of Population and Family Health Sciences, Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, U.S.A.
(FAMILY DEMOGRAPHY, HUMAN RESOURCES, SOCIAL ORGANIZATION, HUMAN RELATIONS, SOCIOLOGY.)
*****
00.17.7 - LEE, James; FENG, Wang.
Malthusian models and Chinese realities: The Chinese demographic system 1700-2000.
This article summarizes major recent findings on Chinese demographic behavior and outlines their relevancy for the Malthusian model of comparative population dynamics and Chinese population in particular. Specifically, it considers four distinctive and persistent features of Chinese behavior during the last 300 years--high rates of female infanticide and abortion, high rates of bachelorhood, low marital fertility, and high rates of male and female adoption--and discusses the origins and implications of such a demographic regime for Chinese economic and social development. Contrasting Chinese demographic behavior with European demographic behavior, the article argues the existence of a demographic system and a demographic transition different from current Malthusian and neo-Malthusian models, and the existence of a system regulating collective demographic behavior in ways distinctly different from Western experience.
English - pp. 33-65.
J. Lee, Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, U.S.A.
(CHINA, EUROPE, POPULATION DYNAMICS, BEHAVIOUR, COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS, POPULATION CONTROL, MALTHUSIAN THEORY.)
*****
00.17.8 - CALDWELL, John C.; BARKAT-E-KHUDA; CALDWELL, Bruce; PIERIS, Indrani; CALDWELL, Pat.
The Bangladesh fertility decline: An interpretation.
The claim has been made, notably in a 1994 World Bank report, that the Bangladesh fertility decline shows that efficient national family planning programs can achieve major fertility declines even in countries that are very poor, and even if females have a low status and significant socioeconomic change has not occurred. This article challenges this claim on the grounds that Bangladesh did experience major social and economic change, real and perceived, over the last two decades. This proposition is supported by official data and by findings of the authors' 1997 field study in rural southeast Bangladesh. That study demonstrates that most Bangladeshis believe that conditions are very different from the situation a generation ago and that on balance there has been improvement. Most also believe that more decisions must now be made by individuals, and these include decisions to have fewer children. In helping to achieve these new fertility aims, however, the services provided by the family planning program constituted an important input.
English - pp. 67-84.
J. C. Caldwell, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.
(BANGLADESH, FERTILITY DECLINE, FERTILITY DETERMINANTS, ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT, FAMILY PLANNING PROGRAMMES.)
*****
00.17.9 - FILMER, Deon; PRITCHETT, Lant.
The effect of household wealth on educational attainment: Evidence from 35 countries.
The authors use household survey data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) from 44 surveys (in 35 countries) to document different patterns in the enrollment and attainment of children from rich and poor households. They overcome the lack of income or expenditure data in the DHS by constructing a proxy for long-run wealth of the household from the asset information in the surveys, using the statistical technique of principal components. There are three major findings. First, the enrollment profiles of the poor differ across countries but fall into distinctive regional patterns: in some regions the poor reach nearly universal enrollment in first grade, but then drop out in large numbers leading to low attainment (typical of South America), while in other regions the poor never enroll in school (typical of South Asia and Western/Central Africa). Second, there are enormous differences across countries in the "wealth gap," the difference in enrollment and educational attainment of the rich and poor. While in some countries the difference in the median years of school completed of the rich and poor is only a year or two, in other countries the wealth gap in attainment is 9 or 10 years. Third, the attainment profiles can be used as diagnostic tools to suggest issues in the educational system, such as the extent to which low attainment is attributable to physical unavailability of schools.
D. Filmer, Development Research Group, The World Bank, U.S.A.
(DEMOGRAPHIC AND HEALTH SURVEYS, SCHOOLING, LEVELS OF EDUCATION, SOCIO-ECONOMIC DIFFERENTIALS, COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS.)
*****
Corn and crisis: Malthus on the high price of provisions.
In 1799 Malthus spent six months in Scandinavia. There he witnessed the extreme deprivation, misery, and mortality that were once the common accompaniments of a bad harvest. On his return to England he found that the topic of the day was the exceptionally high price of bread, which threatened both political turmoil and human suffering. In the event, suffering even among the very poor was far less than in Sweden, though the increase in the price of the chief bread grain was greater. Malthus was intrigued by this apparent paradox. In An investigation of the cause of the present high price of provisions, published in 1800, he resolved it using arguments similar to those developed recently by Amartya Sen in his exposition of the concept of "entitlements." In spite of his principled opposition to the poor laws, Malthus conceded that their effectiveness in transferring purchasing power to those most in need was a major reason for the limited impact of the dearth.
English - pp. 121-128.
E. A. Wrigley, Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, U.K.
(MALTHUSIAN THEORY, POVERTY, FOOD SHORTAGE, PRICES, SOCIAL POLICY.)
*****
00.17.11 - SCHERBOV, Sergei; VAN VIANEN, Harrie.
Marital and fertility careers of Russian women born between 1910 and 1934.
Women born in Russia in the early decades of this century grew up in a period characterized by profound societal changes. Their lives were affected by often devastating events, in particular World War II, that ravaged society when they were entering their childbearing years. This note presents a detailed demographic analysis of the marital and fertility careers of women born between 1910 and 1934 based on individual retrospective life histories, collected in the most recent (5 percent) 1994 microcensus of the Russian Federation. It assesses the influence of external events on age at first marriage, widowhood, divorce, childlessness, parity, and age at birth. A comparison with younger cohorts shows that the societal disturbances had strong temporary effects. However, the final outcomes were not influenced very much: completed fertility continued its slow, secular decline.
English - pp. 129-143.
S. Scherbov, Population Research Centre, University of Groningen, Netherlands.
(RUSSIA, HISTORY, NUPTIALITY, FERTILITY, EVENT HISTORY ANALYSIS, FEMALE GENERATIONS, GENERATION EFFECT.)
*****
17 POPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT REVIEW, June 1999, Vol. 25, N° 2
00.17.12 - LESTHAEGHE, Ron; WILLEMS, Paul.
Is low fertility a temporary phenomenon in the European Union?.
This article addresses two questions: (i) will the mere end of further postponement of fertility in the EU-countries lead to an appreciable rise in European fertility and bring total fertility rates closer to replacement level, as witnessed in the United States and (ii) what are the chances that such a stop to postponement is imminent? The answer to the first question is positive, but only if there is enough recuperation of fertility at older ages. Translated in the Bongaarts-Feeney framework, this condition means that the birth-order-specific TFRs would indeed remain constant. In the absence of full recuperation at older ages, the induced rise in the national TFRs would be trivial and by no means restore period and cohort TFRs to replacement levels. Hence, caution is needed when using the Bongaarts-Feeney adjusted TFRs for projective purposes. With respect to the second question, female education and employment trends in tandem with ideational and family disruption data are used to speculate about the prospects for such an end to further fertility postponement and for fertility increases at older ages. Strikingly, EU-countries that have the greatest potential for still later fertility are also the ones with very low TFRs (below 1.5) at present. The overall conclusion is that low to very low fertility in the EU is unlikely to be a temporary phenomenon.
English - pp. 211-228.
R. Lesthaeghe, Vrije Universiteit, Brussels, Belgium.
(EUROPE, BELOW REPLACEMENT FERTILITY, FERTILITY TRENDS, TOTAL FERTILITY RATE, FERTILITY DETERMINANTS.)
*****
00.17.13 - VAN DALEN, Hendrik P.; HENKENS, Kène.
How influential are demography journals?.
This article examines, by means of citation analysis for the years 1991-1995, the process of knowledge dissemination in demography journals and the intellectual exchange of demography journals with neighboring social sciences. In addition, it investigates the degree of uncitedness in demography journals. It turns out that a considerable percentage of articles are left uncited: 36 percent of the articles published in demography journals between 1990 and 1992 remained uncited in the five years following their publication. However, these overall uncitedness rates conceal large variations between journals. General-oriented demography journals from the US are well cited. Within the set of demography journals, knowledge flows from general to specialized journals and to a lesser extent the other way round. Specialized journals play a minor role in the construction and exchange of fundamental demographic knowledge. They do, however, influence specific audiences in neighboring social sciences.
English - pp. 229-251.
H. P. Van Dalen and K. Henkens, Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute, The Hague, Netherlands.
(PERIODICALS, DEMOGRAPHIC RESEARCH, INFORMA-TION DISSEMINATION.)
*****
00.17.14 - KOHLER, Hans-Peter; RODGERS, Joseph L.; CHRISTENSEN, Kaare.
Is fertility behaviour in our genes? Findings from a Danish twin study.
This article investigates the fertility of Danish twins born during the periods 18701910 and 195364 in order to pursue two central questions for understanding human reproduction: Do genetic dispositions influence fertility and fertility-related behavior? Does the relevance of the "nature versus nurture" debate shift over time or with demographic regimes? The authors find that genetic influences on fertility exist, but that their relative magnitude and pattern are contingent on gender and on the socioeconomic environment experienced by cohorts. Among females born in 188090 and after 1955, about 3050 percent of the variance in fertility is due to genetic influences; these influences are substantially smaller for earlier and for interim birth cohorts. Male fertility is generally subject to smaller genetic and larger shared-environment effects than female fertility. Because genetic effects are most prevalent in situations with deliberately controlled fertility and relatively egalitarian socioeconomic opportunities, the authors propose that the genetic dispositions affect primarily fertility behavior and motivations for having children. Analyses of fertility motivations, measured by age of first attempt to have a child, support this interpretation
English - pp. 253-288.
H.-P. Kohler, Research Group on Social Dynamics and Fertility, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
kohler@demogr.mpg.de.
(DENMARK, POPULATION GENETICS, GENETIC POOL, FERTILITY DETERMINANTS, GENERATION EFFECT.)
*****
Cardiovascular and tuberculosis mortality: The contrasting effects of changes in two causes of death.
Tuberculosis was the largest source of deaths among younger adults, and cardiovascular disease among older adults, in the America of 1900. Decreases in deaths from tuberculosis since 1900 and cardiovascular disease since 1940 explain most of the mortality drops in those age groups over the century. This article, building on previous work by White and Preston, shows the results of increased survival from these two causes on the US population structure. Standard demographic cause-specific mortality calculations are used to generate life tables without deaths from cardiovascular disease or tuberculosis. Then fixed rates for these diseases from early in the century are assumed while all other causes of death are allowed to change as they did historically. Improvements in cardiovascular mortality and tuberculosis produce some seemingly illogical contrasts. More people are alive today because of the decrease in tuberculosis. Yet more deaths from cardiovascular disease have been prevented, and cardiovascular improvements have raised life expectancy more. Lower tuberculosis mortality had virtually no effect on the average age of the population. Lower cardiovascular mortality alone has raised that average more than all twentieth-century causes of improved mortality combined.
English - pp. 289-302.
K. M. White, Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania, U.S.A.
(UNITED STATES, HISTORY, MORTALITY DECLINE, CAUSES OF DEATH, TUBERCULOSIS, CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASES.)
*****
International migration at the dawn of the twenty-first century: The role of the state.
This note reviews recent theoretical and empirical work on the determinants and efficacy of state immigration policies to draw conclusions about the future direction of policy regimes throughout the globe and their likely effects. An age of increasingly restrictive immigration policies is emerging, but it is still unclear how effective these policies will be in controlling the volume and composition of international migration. States can be located along a continuum of efficacy with respect to the imposition of restrictive policies. Unfortunately, virtually all research done to date has focused on the effectiveness of restrictive policies in major immigrant-receiving developed countries. More research needs to be done to determine just how effective restrictive immigration policies can be under varying degrees of state capacity.
English - pp. 303-322.
D. S. Massey, Sociology Department, University of Pennsylvania, U.S.A.
(INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION, MIGRATION POLICY, GOVERNMENT POLICY, TRENDS.)
*****
India's falling sex ratios.
The proportion of females in India's population, low compared to other countries, reached its lowest level this century in the 1991 census. India's low sex ratiosdefined here as the number of females relative to the number of maleshave been scrutinized for well over a century. The persistent decline in the twentieth century has been the subject of renewed investigation and critical comment over the past two decades. While many explanations for the decline have been offered, almost without exception these have not addressed the causes of the nearly continuous fall observed since 1901. Several possible long-term changes are investigated in this note. The author argues that India's declining sex ratio is primarily an artifact of the dynamics of India's population growth.
English - pp. 323-343.
P. Mayer, Politics Department, University of Adelaide, Australia.
(INDIA, SEX RATIO, TRENDS, POPULATION DYNAMICS.)
*****
Back to Home page