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The White Paper on Chinese population policy, entitled "Family Planning in China," was issued by the Chinese Information Office of the State Council on August 23, 1995. The population problem is an important question that touches upon the survival and development of the Chinese nation, the success or failure of China's modernization drive as well as the coordinated and sustained development between the population on one hand and the economy, society, resources and environment on the other. It is a natural choice that the Chinese government has made to implement family planning, control population growth and improve the life quality of the population a basic state policy on the basis of a wish to make the state strong and powerful, the nation prosperous and the people happy. In the 1960s, the country's population entered its second peak birth period. From 1962 to 1972, the annual number of births in China averaged 26.69 million, totaling 300 million. In the practice of carrying out family planning programme, whilst persistently proceeding from its reality and taking into full account and observing principles and regulations concerning population and family planning formulated by international institutions and organizations, the Chinese government has gradually set up guiding principles, policies, measures and methods that reflect the basic interests and various rights and interests of the people and has continuously improved these as the actual situations change, so as to better safeguard the right to subsistence and development of the Chinese region.

This article presents an excerpt from the second volume of the book "Collected Economic Papers."

This paper brings a new perspective to the population growth implications of the low fertility levels of European countries. For years between 2009 and 2018, whether constant fertility, mortality, and net migration would generate long‐run population growth or population decrease is indicated simply and visually by comparison of the total fertility rate (TFR) to a migration‐adjusted replacement level. The results show that, when considered in combination with concurrent net migration and mortality, the population growth implication of low fertility varies between countries and over time. For Sweden, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the United Kingdom for all the years considered the fertility–mortality–migration combination is coherent with long‐run population growth. For the former two countries, long‐run population growth would be sustained by net migration at current levels even if fertility were to fall to very low levels. In contrast, for every Eastern European country and year considered, unchanged fertility–mortality–migration combination would lead to population decrease. The need for an alternative view of low fertility in terms of whether the TFR is above or below a migration‐adjusted replacement level and the need for a migration context‐specific view, as distinct from a universal best view, of the desirability of fertility level are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, which link transfers to investment in human capital in poor families, have spread around the world over the past two decades. This paper studies the medium‐term effects of Progresa, the pioneering Mexican CCT program, on fertility using nationwide vital statistics combined with administrative data on program receipt. The effects of CCTs are likely to vary by age of the woman, and we study impacts by five‐year age intervals. We test and account for possible underreporting of births using indirect methods. We find that Progresa led to an important and statistically significant decline in teenage fertility and smaller, but still significant, effects on reducing the fertility of older women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an excerpt from the "China's Social Security and Its Policy," issued by the Information Office of the State Council, Beijing, September 2004.

This paper analyzes the impact of pronatalist rhetoric on women's fertility preferences in Turkey using a mixed‐methods approach. Since 2008, Prime Minister (and since 2014 President) Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has given speeches about the necessity of increasing fertility and has demanded at least three children from families. This call was supported by monetary incentives in 2015. I analyze the impact of the rhetoric on women's fertility preferences between 2008 and 2013. In the first part of the paper, I use qualitative data I collected through in‐depth interviews in 2013 to show a relationship between women's political orientation and their acceptance of the rhetoric. Then, using quantitative data from the 2008 and 2013 rounds of the Turkey Demographic and Health Surveys, I analyze whether the pronatalist rhetoric had an independent effect on increasing fertility preferences. An individual‐level religiosity variable is used as a proxy to account for women's responsiveness to the rhetoric. I find that religiosity was positively related to women's desire to have a third child in both 2008 and 2013, but it was statistically significant only in 2013 after the rhetoric had been widely circulated in the media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As our societies transform into knowledge societies, skills are playing an ever‐increasing role in life. Despite recent efforts to consistently measure adult skills across countries, a challenge remains to understand how skills evolve over time and what the main drivers behind these changes are. By applying demographic methods to estimate the development of skills over the life course, this paper presents the reconstruction of empirical adult literacy test results along cohort lines by age, sex, and educational attainment for 44 countries for the period 1970–2015. Results suggest significant heterogeneity in the pattern of changes in literacy skills with age, reflecting the differential exposure to cognitive stimulation over the life course and suggesting that the development of skills in a country is also the consequence of a changing composition of its population. Gender, however, was found to have hardly any effect on how literacy skills evolve between the ages of 15 and 65. On the aggregate level, findings reveal considerable differences between countries—regarding both the level of skills and their development over time. Overall, it was found that massive educational expansions happening globally in the recent past only partly resulted in a corresponding rise in skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the German post‐reunification context dominated by economic uncertainty and structural change, this paper studies the effects of import shocks from China on the fertility decisions of individuals working in the German manufacturing sector between 1995 and 2016. While focusing on trade shocks related to Chinese imported goods, the paper explores individual fertility via the labor market outcomes of manufacturing workers, roughly a fifth of German employment. I investigate the gender‐specific effects of Chinese import competition on individual fertility and explain the channels mediating each of them. I find that globalization affects overall fertility negatively, but the effect is positive for women and negative for men. Results indicate a reduction in the employment opportunity of individuals, an increase in marginal employment and higher economic insecurity. There is a substitution effect in the labor supply of women, here prevalently concentrated in low‐technology sectors: as female earnings fall and their opportunity cost of work is lower, the prospect of having children possibly becomes a more rewarding alternative. Given concerns over low fertility in Germany, findings are particularly important for understanding the German social and economic structure that enabled the country's post‐reunification transformation but also allowed heavy labor market segmentation and atypical work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

City populations grow due to natural change, migration, and areas that are reclassified as part of a city. Because a time series of city boundaries was not available, most analyses ignore reclassification. This paper measures reclassification in a harmonized and transparent manner by applying a new harmonized definition of cities, towns, and rural areas, called the degree of urbanization, to gridded population data between 1980 and 2020. Ignoring reclassification would attribute city population growth equally to natural change and migration. Including the effects of reclassification reveals that two‐thirds of the growth is due to natural change, followed by reclassification (29 percent), and the remainder to migration (4 percent). This demonstrates the importance of accounting for reclassification. It also underlines that discouraging migration to cities will not significantly reduce city population growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migration theorizing has coalesced around sets encompassing several frameworks. Despite many contributions of these collections, contemporary migration theorizing exhibits three important shortcomings, which this paper aims to address. First, sets of theories have traditionally not explicitly and jointly addressed fundamental questions in migration, namely (i) key motivations beyond those related to “labor” (turmoil; environmental strain; family, or self‐realization factors); (ii) how important axes of social difference produce distinct motivations and mechanisms (e.g., by gender and sexuality); (iii) the (in)direct roles of the state; (iv) important spatial considerations, that is, immobility, internal versus international movement, step/onward/secondary migrations; and (v) key issues of temporality, that is, return migration, its timing, and intentionality. Engaging with classical and contemporary scholarship, I provide an updated, revised, and broadened set of frameworks and analytical lenses that better incorporate these issues. Second, the most common typology used to categorize frameworks into “initiation” and “continuation” suffers from ambiguity and imprecision. I offer a new classification, typifying mechanisms as more/less endogenous to prior migrations. Third, scholarship has advanced little in systematically examining whether/how theories relate to each other. I provide a basic taxonomy of mechanism “competition,” “coexistence,” co‐occurrence, and interrelation. I conclude by proposing a new and expanded set of frameworks and analytical lenses, reflecting on the implications of these modifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the COVID‐19 pandemic began in early 2020, speculation was rife both in public and academic spheres over its possible effects on birth rates and partnership behavior. Now, over four years later, we still know surprisingly little about the effect of COVID‐19 on fertility and family dynamics. In this paper, we outline three main takeaways from the scientific literature produced on this topic in the past four years. We argue that (1) we still do not have enough data to answer basic questions about the effect of COVID‐19 on fertility and family dynamics, (2) the data we do have suggest an unexpectedly incoherent and heterogeneous response, and (3) the estimated effects we do have are suspect since shifting and theoretically unexpected prepandemic fertility behavior made identifying a strict causal effect of the pandemic problematic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the onset of the first wave of COVID‐19 in the United States, the pandemic's effect on future birthrates was unknown. In this paper, we assess whether digital trace data—often touted as a panacea for traditional data scarcity—held the potential to accurately predict fertility change caused by the COVID‐19 pandemic in the United States. Specifically, we produced state‐level, dynamic future predictions of the pandemic's effect on birthrates in the United States using pregnancy‐related Google search data. Importantly, these predictions were made in October 2020 (and revised in February 2021), well before the birth effect of the pandemic could have possibly been known. Our analysis predicted that between November 2020 and February 2021, monthly United States births would drop sharply by approximately 12 percent, then begin to rebound while remaining depressed through August 2021. While these predictions were generally accurate in terms of the magnitude and timing of the trough, there were important misses regarding the speed at which these reductions materialized and rebounded. This ex post evaluation of an ex ante prediction serves as a powerful demonstration of the "promise and pitfalls" of digital trace data in demographic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to explain fertility dynamics during the pandemic, while considering countries' institutional context. We argue that containment policies disrupted people's lives and increased their uncertainty more in countries with weak welfare support systems, while health‐related and economic support NPIs mitigated such disruptions much more there, as they were less expected by citizens. We estimate monthly "excess" crude birth rates (CBRs) and find that countries with low public support—Southern Europe, East Asia, and Eastern Europe—experienced larger decreases and less of a rebound in CBRs than countries with histories of high public spending—Western, Central, and Northern Europe. However, in low support countries, NPIs are much more strongly associated with excess CBRs—containment NPIs more negatively and health and economic support NPIs more positively—with the exception of the one‐month lag of containment NPIs, for which the opposite holds. When putting these coefficients into broader perspective, our findings suggest that the actual implementation of all NPIs taken together mitigated fertility declines. This is especially the case for low public support countries, whereas one might have seen a birth decline even in high support countries if the NPIs were not implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID‐19 pandemic has prompted questions about individuals' fertility intentions and decisions during such a large‐scale, drawn‐out crisis. In this paper, I ask how women who have not (yet) had children and who are nearing the end of their timeline for parenthood are making sense of the pandemic. Drawing on novel in‐depth interview data conducted during the pandemic with over 100 women aged 35–50 in the United States who are childless for a variety of reasons, I argue that the pandemic has produced a shared sense of "gendered uncertainty" by exacerbating both preexisting worries about motherhood and unease about the future. As the data further reveal, the pandemic has therefore been conceived of by many childless women as a good time to not have children, particularly in light of the United States' weak infrastructure of family support. These findings contribute to existing theoretical frameworks of fertility change by foregrounding women's subjective evaluations of their reproductive options during a time of upheaval and introducing the important role of gendered uncertainty in shaping reproductive sense‐making. Findings also contribute to the literature on childlessness by demonstrating how childlessness can gain newfound appeal as a family status during turbulent times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. Census has grappled with public concerns about privacy since the first enumeration in 1790. Beginning in the mid‐nineteenth century, census officials began responding to concerns about privacy with promises of confidentiality. In recent years, escalating concerns about confidentiality have threatened to reduce the usability of publicly accessible population data. This paper traces the history of privacy and disclosure control since 1790. We argue that controlling public access to census information has never been an effective response to public concerns about government intrusion. We conclude that the Census Bureau should weigh the costs of curtailing access to reliable data against realistic measures of the benefit of new approaches to disclosure control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the role of family trajectories during childhood in explaining inequalities by maternal education in children's math and reading skills using harmonized, longitudinal, and nationally representative surveys, which follow children over the course of primary and lower secondary school in four high‐income countries (England, France, Germany, and the United States). As single parenthood and family transitions are more likely among less educated parents and are associated with fewer resources for children, we explore whether growing up outside a stable two‐parent family mediates educational inequalities in math and reading scores. Results show a strong educational gradient in family trajectories in the four countries, but this varies by child age and by country. Children who experience a family transition record lower test scores, although the magnitude differs by the type of postseparation arrangements. Overall, family trajectories are strongly associated with children's math and reading scores but, because of the importance of selectivity in family trajectories, they play only a modest role in explaining the skills gaps by maternal education, considerably less than determinants such as income. The penalties associated with not living within a stable two‐parent family are always larger in the United States and England than in France and Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Behind the steady march of progress toward longer life expectancy in many low‐mortality countries, there have been setbacks even before the Covid‐19 pandemic. In this paper, we use an exploratory approach to describe the temporal structure, age patterns, and geographic aspects of life expectancy reversals. We find that drops in life expectancy are often followed by larger than average improvements, which tells us that most reversals are transitory with little long‐term influence. The age structure of mortality decline when life expectancy falls is tilted toward older ages, a pattern that is quite different from the general pattern of mortality improvement. Geographic analysis shows that mortality reversals are correlated across neighboring countries like Italy and France, or Canada and the United States. These findings are consistent with contagious disease and weather being important causes of life expectancy reversals. We conclude with a discussion of implications for formal modeling and forecasting of mortality to accommodate these patterns that violate some standard assumptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the post‐Recession era, U.S. fertility rates have continued to fall. It is unclear if these declines are driven by shifts in fertility goals or growing difficulty in achieving goals. In this paper, we construct synthetic cohorts of men and women to examine both cross‐cohort and within‐cohort changes in fertility goals using multiple cycles of the National Survey of Family Growth. Although more recent cohorts exhibit lower achieved fertility at younger ages than earlier cohorts at the same age, intended parity remains around two children, and intentions to remain childless rarely exceed 15 percent. There is weak evidence of a growing fertility gap in the early 30s, suggesting more recent cohorts will need considerable childbearing in the 30s and early 40s to "catch up" to earlier goals, yet low‐parity women in their early 40s are decreasingly likely to have unfulfilled fertility desires or intentions to have children. Low‐parity men in their early 40s, though, are increasingly likely to intend children. Declines in U.S. fertility thus seem to be largely driven not by changes in early‐life fertility goals so much as either a decreasing likelihood of achieving earlier goals or, perhaps, shifts in the preferred timing of fertility that depress period measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The age distribution of a population is a product of a century of demographic history. This paper describes how the history of births, deaths, and migrations has fashioned the US age distribution in 2018. It also shows how that history, combined with contemporary processes, was actively producing changes in the age distribution between 2013 and 2018. Changes in survivorship, migration, and births all contributed to population aging during this period, with a declining growth rate of births the leading contributor. Using a novel approach, the paper demonstrates how the inertia reflected in changing age distributions sheds light on the future population of the United States. Massive growth in the population above age 70 will occur by 2033 if recent age patterns of age‐specific mortality and migration are maintained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In low‐ and middle‐income countries, significant differences in fertility beliefs between rural and urban areas arise from the differential timing and pace of fertility declines. Demographers have long hypothesized about the diffusion of these beliefs and behaviors from urban to rural areas, potentially via temporary rural–urban labor migration. In this paper, we investigate the association between temporary internal migration from rural Senegal to the capital city, Dakar, and differences in the fertility and contraceptive beliefs and preferences of migrants and nonmigrants. We test socialization, selection, and adaptation hypotheses by comparing the fertility ideation of current and returning migrants with that of nonmigrants and future migrants from their place of origin. Our results support selection effects, explaining half of the differences between nonmigrants and migrants. Once selection effects are removed, significant differences remain between nonmigrants and current or returning migrants. These differences are largely explained by two complementary measures of adaptation: years lived in Dakar and the number of ties to residents of that city. The results indicate that adaptation is as important, if not more so than selection in explaining differences between migrants and nonmigrants. This holds true even for returned migrants five years after their last migration spell. Of the two potential adaptation mechanisms explored, the time spent in Dakar generally explained adaptation better than ties to nonmigrants in Dakar. However, our complementary analyses do not rule out the importance of urban networks on fertility, as they contribute to migrant selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the strongest empirical regularities in spatial demography is that flows of migrants are positively associated with population stocks at origin and destination and are inversely related to distance. This pattern was formalized into what are known as gravity models of migration. Traditionally, distance is measured geographically, but other measures of distance, such as cultural distance, are also relevant in explaining migration flows. However, measures of cultural distance are not widely adopted in the literature on modeling migration flows, partially because of the difficulties associated with operationalizing and producing these measures across space and time. In this paper, we use a scalable approach to obtain proxies for measuring cultural similarity between countries by using Facebook data and illustrate the impact of incorporating these measures, based on food and drink interests, into gravity models for predicting migration. Our results show that, despite their limitations, the new measures of cultural similarity derived from Facebook data improve the prediction power of traditional gravity models and have a predictive capacity comparable to that of classic variables used in the literature, such as shared language and history. The results open up new opportunities for understanding the determinants of migration and for predicting migration when considering broader and complementary perspectives on the meaning and measurement of distance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expansion in access to public infrastructure can have varied, microlevel impacts. In this paper, we use a discrete and quasi‐random change in the access to paved roads through a large‐scale rural road construction program in India to study how road access impacts fertility decisions and investments in child health. We find that increased access to paved roads at the district level decreases fertility, improves investments in children, and lowers infant mortality. We also provide evidence that highlights the mechanisms that drive this effect. First, we show that local roads improve access to health care facilities and raise immunization rates, which reduces infant mortality. Then, we demonstrate that last‐mile road connectivity has contrasting effects on employment across gender. Overall, the evidence suggests that rural roads can help accelerate demographic transition through their effects on fertility and infant mortality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Published estimates of 2050 food demand exhibit an enormous range of values. This paper projects a 50–60 percent increase in total global food demand between 2019 and 2050. Our analysis indicates a substantial slowing of rice demand, a growing share of palm oil in world fats and oils markets, and a continued shift to poultry as the dominant form of meat consumption. In contrast to most existing food models, we integrate fish consumption into the analysis of vegetable and animal protein and highlight the dangers of using commonly cited feed ratios for projecting feed grain demand. More broadly, we demonstrate the value of a commodity by region approach for understanding complexities in the world food system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on climate exposures and human migration has focused largely on assessing short‐term responses to temperature and precipitation shocks. In this paper, we suggest that this common coping strategies model can be extended to account for mechanisms that link environmental conditions to migration behavior over longer periods of time. We argue that early‐life climate exposures may affect the likelihood of migration from childhood through early adulthood by influencing parental migration, community migration networks, human capital development, and decisions about household resource allocation, all of which are correlates of geographic mobility. After developing this conceptual framework, we evaluate the corresponding hypotheses using a big data approach, analyzing 20 million individual georeferenced records from 81 censuses implemented across 31 countries in tropical Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. For each world region, we estimate regression models that predict lifetime migration (a change in residence between birth and ages 30–39) as a function of temperature and precipitation anomalies in early life, defined as the year prior to birth to age four. Results suggest that early‐life climate is systematically associated with changes in the probability of lifetime migration in most regions of the tropics, with the largest effects observed in sub‐Saharan Africa. In East and Southern Africa, the effects of temperature shocks vary by sex and educational attainment and in a manner that suggests women and those of lower socioeconomic status are most vulnerable. Finally, we compare our main results with models using alternative measures of climate exposures. This comparison suggests climate exposures during the prenatal period and first few years of life are particularly (but not exclusively) salient for lifetime migration, which is most consistent with the hypothesized human capital mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of the recent evolution of social assistance in the developing world, looking at its complex typological configuration, which has interlinked with, and partly reflects the complex demographic and epidemiological transitions and rapid urbanization and economic convergence that many developing countries have exhibited over the past decades. The paper underscores the principles of the poverty focus of social assistance and presents an overview of existence evidence of first‐ and second‐order effects of social assistance, particularly in the domains of poverty, education, health, and labor markets. Moreover, the paper highlights the knowledge gaps with regard to the longer term and gender‐specific welfare effects of social assistance, and the redistributive effects, and the incentives and distortion mechanisms that transfer programs can generate in the labor and insurance markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper synthesizes insights from new global data on the effectiveness of migration policies. It investigates the complex links between migration policies and migration trends to disentangle policy effects from structural migration determinants. The analysis challenges two central assumptions underpinning the popular idea that migration restrictions have failed to curb migration. First, post‐WWII global migration levels have not accelerated, but remained relatively stable while most shifts in migration patterns have been directional. Second, post‐WWII migration policies have generally liberalized despite political rhetoric suggesting the contrary. While migration policies are generally effective, "substitution effects" can limit their effectiveness, or even make them counterproductive, by geographically diverting migration, interrupting circulation, encouraging unauthorized migration, or prompting "now or never" migration surges. These effects expose fundamental policy dilemmas and highlight the importance of understanding the economic, social, and political trends that shape migration in sometimes counterintuitive, but powerful, ways that largely lie beyond the reach of migration policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Age differences within couples are of considerable importance for the power relations between partners. These age differences become particularly relevant when couples transition to having a(nother) child, as such an event often results in a renegotiation of the gendered division of labor. Surprisingly, the literature on female empowerment and fertility postponement has so far paid little attention to parental age differences. This paper makes use of a new data set to present a demographic analysis of trends in parental age differences at childbirth in 15 high‐income countries, covering a period in which all of these countries experienced changes in gender relations and fertility postponement. The general trends in rising mean ages at childbirth have evolved quite similarly among men and women. However, we demonstrate that these similarities hide previously unexplored and highly gendered disparities in parental age differences. Older mothers report much smaller mean parental age differences than younger mothers, and this age pattern among mothers has further polarized over time. By contrast, older fathers report larger parental age differences than younger fathers, while the disparities by age among fathers have not changed much over time. We discuss the relevance of our findings at both the individual and the societal level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents new evidence on the interaction between demographic and occupational change in Europe over the last 25 years. We use data from the European Union Labour Force Survey covering six European countries. The analysis is based on a cross‐sectional comparison between the population and employment distributions in 1995 and 2019. This strategy allows us to study the changing demographic dynamics, which have brought a more feminized, aged, and educated working population, in a context of structural employment change, where higher job polarization or occupational upgrading are the main patterns. The results indicate that the increasing female participation has been associated with a strong general process of occupational upgrading that particularly benefited women. Still, the occupational profile of women is polarized relative to men. Although the process of educational upgrading was also stronger for women and overall they improved their occupational profile more than that of men, we find declining occupational returns to higher education for female workers in two countries. Finally, while European labor markets could accommodate the large increase in older workers, their occupational profile suffered some downgrading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Female labor force participation rates have been stagnating despite rising female education in sub‐Saharan Africa since the turn of the millennium. Using representative and repeated census data from a heterogeneous sample of 13 sub‐Saharan African countries, this paper analyzes female labor force participation from a demographic perspective. We show that enrollment in education is substantially higher among the most recent female cohorts than among the earlier‐born ones. The higher enrollment mechanically depresses female labor force participation, weakening the relationship between female labor force participation and education. After taking this cohort trend into account, we find a strong and positive association between female labor force participation and female education. We further find a cohort trend toward higher female employment in the nonprimary sector and a positive association between female employment in the nonprimary sector and female education. The higher investments in education by younger female cohorts, together with the demographics of sub‐Saharan African countries, have implications for a potentially arising "demographic dividend". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women's property ownership matters for their well‐being and agency, broader economic prosperity, and children's development. However, until recently, a lack of data has constrained further exploration of gender differences in property ownership in the developing world. Using data from 41 developing countries, this paper contributes to the literature by investigating gender gaps in the incidence of property ownership among couples and the factors associated with these gaps, focusing on the role of legal systems. We find that in almost all countries, husbands are more likely to own property than wives. Across countries in our sample, husbands are, on average, 2.7 times more like than wives to own property alone and 1.4 times more likely to own property alone or jointly. Within countries, gender gaps in the incidence of property ownership are most pronounced for disadvantaged groups, that is, the rural population and the poorest quintile. These gender gaps reflect a variety of factors, including discriminatory laws with respect to inheritance, property ownership, marital regimes, and laws that protect from workplace discrimination. Countries with more gender egalitarian legal regimes have higher levels of property ownership by married women, especially housing, suggesting that legal reforms are a potential mechanism to increase women's property ownership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effect of maternal education on child mortality in Bangladesh by exploiting quasi‐experimental variations in the duration of exposure to a school stipend project for identification. Results from the instrumental variable estimation indicate that an additional year of maternal schooling reduces both under‐five and infant mortality by about 20 percent. The findings are statistically significant and robust to a number of model specifications, including survival models controlling for right censoring of child mortality. Analysis of potential mechanisms suggests that maternal education reduces child mortality through greater wealth and literacy, positive assortative mating, lower fertility, delayed marriage and childbearing, greater health‐related knowledge, better health‐seeking behaviors, and female empowerment, but not through female employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies long‐term trends and patterns in global refugee migration. We explore the intensity, spread, and distance of refugee migration at a global, regional, and country level between 1951 and 2018. The analysis did not detect a long‐term increase in the global intensity of refugee migration. Primarily depending on levels of conflict, refugee numbers have fluctuated at levels of between 0.1 and 0.3 percent of the world population. Apparent increases in numbers of the globally displaced are driven by the inclusion of populations and countries that were previously excluded from the data. While refugee populations continue to be concentrated in countries with low‐to‐medium income levels, the analysis reveals several geographic shifts in refugee migration. Refugees tend to come from a shrinking number of origin countries and move to an increasing variety of destination countries. This trend seems to reflect a concentration of recurrent conflict cycles in a relatively small number of countries and a parallel increase in the number of safe destinations. Although the vast majority of refugees remain near to origin countries, the average distance between origin and destination countries has increased over time, presumably linked to the greater ease of travel and migration‐facilitating networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between levels of social and economic inequality and demographic changes remains poorly documented, particularly for fertility. Covering a period from 1986 to 2018, this paper documents a positive country‐level association between income inequality and the dispersion of first birth schedules among women from 88 countries of the Global South. This association is driven by a dual dynamic of the decreasing mean age at first birth among a shrinking group of women who transition to motherhood early, and the increasing mean age at first birth and rising heterogeneity in the timing of childbearing among a group of first birth delayers. We show that this association is strongest in countries where the total fertility rate is below 2.5 children per woman. We argue that differential opportunities for accessing quality education, formal labor markets, and migration are potential drivers of the rising heterogeneity in the ages at which women transition to childbearing. These results highlight the importance of examining societal and demographic processes jointly and clearly indicate that more and better‐quality data on social and economic inequality are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article elaborates a conceptual framework for assessing the character and effectiveness of immigration policies. It argues that, to a considerable extent, the public and academic controversy concerning this issue is spurious because of fuzzy definitions of policy effectiveness, stemming from confusion between (1) policy discourses, (2) policies on paper, (3) policy implementation, and (4) policy impacts. The article distinguishes three policy gaps: the discrepancy between public discourses and policies on paper (discursive gap); the disparity between policies on paper and implemented policies (implementation gap); and the extent to which implemented policies affect migration (efficacy gap). Although implemented policies seem to be the correct yardstick to assess policy effectiveness, in practice the (generally more pronounced) discourses are often used as a benchmark. This can lead to an overestimation of policy failure. Existing empirical studies suggest that policies significantly affect the targeted migration flows, but they crucially fail to assess the relative importance of policies in comparison to other migration determinants, including non-migration policies, as well as the hypothetical occurrence of unintended categorical, spatial, inter-temporal, and reverse flow "substitution" effects. Evidence on such effects is still scarce, showing the need for more empirically informed insights about the short- and long-term effects of migration policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we provide the first household‐level empirical multievent study of temporary internal migration as a consequence of tropical storms. In order to do, so we combine three waves of the Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey with geo‐referenced tropical cyclone data from the Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship. Based on the resulting panel dataset, we study temporary emigration patterns evolving in the aftermath of occurring storms in the sample communes. We find robust empirical evidence in favor of a significant push effect on temporary migration. Occurring storms increase the likelihood that a household sends members to other regions in Vietnam. Storms also tend to increase the number of absent household members and absence time. Moreover, we show that occurring storms increase both seasonal and long‐term absences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the course of the twentieth century, social scientists and policy analysts have produced a large volume of literature on whether policies boost fertility. This paper describes the results of a systematic review of the literature on the effects of policy on fertility since 1970 in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia. Empirical studies were selected through extensive systematic searches, including studies using an experimental or quasi‐experimental design. Thirty‐five studies were included, covering reforms of parental leave, childcare, health services, and universal child transfers. In line with previous reviews, we find that childcare expansions increase completed fertility, while increased cash transfers have temporary effects. New evidence on parental leave expansions, particularly from Central Europe, suggests larger effects than previously established. High‐earning couples benefit more from parental leave expansions, while expanding childcare programs can reduce social inequalities on other domains. Subsidizing assisted reproductive treatments shows some promise of increasing birth rates for women over the age of 35. Countries that to date have limited support for families can build on solid evidence if they choose to expand these programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the extent to which in utero exposure to temperature shocks affects birth weight outcomes in Vietnam. Exploiting the variations across districts and conception timing within districts, we show that a one standard deviation increase in temperature relative to the local norm (approximately 0.52°C) during the first trimester of pregnancy reduces the child's weight at birth by 67 g or 2.2 percent. Our heterogeneity analysis suggests that infants living in rural areas, born to poor and low‐educated mothers are especially vulnerable to temperature shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using census and survey microdata from 69 countries worldwide, in this paper we document levels of intergenerational coresidence over the life course and examine changes in recent decades. We present evidence of a generalized pattern of increase in intergenerational coresidence during the initial decade of this century. This is most evident among people aged 20–30 and, at least in regions such as Europe and North America and in Latin America and the Caribbean, affects women as much or more than it does men. Rates of increase are fastest in Asia (especially among men), robust in Europe and Latin America, and relatively slow in Africa. This shift is occurring in a variety of demographic, economic, and cultural contexts and appears to run counter to expectations that intergenerational coresidence would gradually decline with modernization and cultural change. We discuss the extent to which these results challenge existing interpretations of the role of the family in contemporary society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies have reported that the age‐adjusted incidence of cognitive impairment and dementia have decreased over the past two decades. Aging is the predominant risk factor for Alzheimer's disease and related dementias and for neurocognitive decline. However, aging alone cannot explain changes in the overall age‐adjusted incidence of dementia. The objective of this position paper was to describe the potential for cohort and period effects in cognitive decline and incidence of dementia. Cohort effects have long been reported in demographic literature, but starting in the early 1980s researchers began reporting large historical cohort trends in cognitive function. At the same time, period effects have emerged in the form of economic factors and stressors in early and midlife that may result in reduced cognitive dysfunction. Recognizing that aging individuals today were once children and adolescents and that research has clearly noted that childhood cognitive performance are associated with old‐age cognitive performance, this review proposes the need to connect these cohort effects with differences in late‐life functioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fertility researchers rely upon a simple binary: pregnant versus not pregnant. However, this conceptualization does not capture many women's experiences, both historically and in numerous settings today. We suggest that pregnancy status may be a much more ambiguous state, and that such ambiguity is often productive for women. Building a culturally sensitive understanding of what we are calling "productive ambiguity" can foster more rigorous studies of fertility that better capture potential pregnancy and the range of post‐coital fertility‐inhibiting actions women take, both intentionally and not. In this paper, we aim to: 1) describe the ambiguity that exists around pregnancy; 2) explain the ways in which this ambiguity is productive for women; 3) analyze two concrete examples of such ambiguity in practice: the case of menstrual regulation and the unexpected conceptual overlaps between contraception and early abortion in a variety of settings, and finally; 4) suggest ways that this more nuanced understanding might inform fertility research, including abortion measurement research. We combine recent qualitative and quantitative data with historical sources to analyze the cultural logics and power dynamics of this ambiguity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education, general health, and reproductive health are key indicators of human development. Investments in these domains can also promote economic growth. This paper argues for human development–related investments based on (1) a theoretical economic growth model with poverty traps, (2) a literature review of evidence that different human development–related investments can promote growth, and (3) own empirical analyses of 1980–2015 data that aim to estimate the relative contribution of different human development indicators to economic growth across heterogeneous growth regimes. Our results suggest the following associations: (1) a one‐child decrease in the total fertility rate corresponds to a 2 percentage point (pp) increase in annual per capita gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the short run (five years) and 0.5 pp higher annual growth in the mid‐run to long run (35 years), (2) a 10 percent increase in life expectancy at birth corresponds to a 1 pp increase in annual per capita GDP growth in the short run and 0.4 pp higher growth in the mid‐run to long run, and (3) a one‐year increase in average educational attainment corresponds to a 0.7 pp increase in annual growth in the short run and 0.3 pp higher growth in the mid‐run to long run. By contrast, infrastructure proxies are not significantly associated with subsequent growth in any of the models estimated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite growing efforts to conceptualize residential mobility and migration as long‐term trajectories, because of methodological challenges and the lack of adequate data, most empirical studies have resorted to examining year‐to‐year changes in place of residence. As a result, the impact of past migration experiences on future migration behavior remains poorly understood. To shed light on time interdependencies in individual migration trajectories, this paper examines associations between past moves and subsequent migration behavior from birth to age 50, distinguishing between (i) intraregional mobility, interregional migration and international migration and (ii) return and onward moves. By applying multinominal regression models to retrospective life history data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we demonstrate that the decision to migrate at a particular point in time is embedded within a wider migration history that started in childhood. However, we also find that the effect of past moves diminishes as individuals progress in their migration career. These findings hold for intraregional, interregional and international moves. Altogether, these findings lend support to our theoretical proposition that migration is a learned behavior and highlight the importance of accounting for time interdependency in individuals' migration trajectories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article discusses the issues focused upon in the Population Summit held in October 1993 in New Delhi, India. Organized by 15 of the world's scientific academies, this gathering was the first large-scale collaborative activity of its kind. It brought together academicians and other invited scholars representing over 60 scientific academies to examine the relationships between population, natural resources, and the environment. The massive volume that resulted from the summit, covering the invited papers plus some peripheral materials, was published quickly, well in time to serve as background papers for the September 1994 International Conference on Population and Development. The underlying theme in the New Delhi manifesto is the need for internationally coordinated planned action. Improved pricing, taxing and regulatory policies that take into account environmental costs, thereby influencing consumption behavior is an ambitious goal. In sum, to criticize the groping for social improvement is to attack virtue, virtuous people and the greatest offense of all, a reform-minded international bureaucracy.

This article presents information related to some selected publications. Some of the publications are: In "Prospects of Population: Methodology and Assumptions," a distinguished group of experts prepared this collection of papers as background material to improve the quality and utility of the UN set of national, regional and global projections. The discussed methodological and empirical issues provide, among other things, an indication of problem areas and may stimulate scholars specializing in projections to elaborate on the issues. The book "Agrarian Systems and Rural Development," by P. Dharam Ghai is the outcome of research that carried out under the world employment program of the International Labour Office that analyzes the performance of different forms of organizations and institutions in promoting rural development. The nine case studies are divided into three broad categories of agrarian systems: individual farming carried out under private ownership of land and other means of production; communal farming carried out under collective ownership of land; and an imprecise intermediate category that includes Guyana, Tanzania and Egypt.

This article presents selected publications related to demography. The book "The Economic Approach to Human Behavior" by Gary S. Becker is a collection of essays by the leading theorist of the microeconomics of fertility. It elaborates the simple proposition that "the economic approach is a comprehensive one that is applicable to all human behavior." Most of the essays have appeared over the past two decades in the "Journal of Political Economy" and other economics journals. The book "Adolescent Fertility: The Proceedings of an International Conference" edited by Donald J. Bogue presents the conference papers covering a variety of topics, cultures, and countries, grouped under the following headings: magnitude of the problem of adolescent fertility; implications of the problem; strategies for action; sex education; experimental programs; problem areas; policy. Despite the diversity of perspective, from an anecdotal to a national statistical account, the papers and discussion both emphasize that adolescent childbearing, in or out of wedlock, is detrimental to physical health and social and economic well-being.

The article presents abstracts of various papers published in the March 1, 1978 issue of the Population & Development Review. The paper "Human Population Problems in the Biosphere: Some Research Strategies and Designs," describes interdisciplinary strategies and methods that can be used in research planning; they are designed, in particular, for application within UNESCO's intergovernmental and interdisciplinary Program on Man and the Biosphere. The paper "Population and Development: Requirements for Rural Communication Strategy," is useful only for the rapidly shrinking audience not already exposed to the message that family planning "is not a limited concept related only to the use of contraceptives but is placed within the context of total family welfare, community development, and national progress. The paper "Ethics and Population," deals with the ethical principles of devising a morally acceptable population program and presents theories of utilitarianism and discusses issues policymakers need to consider if they are to determine whether adequate utilitarian criteria exist to set an optimum population size.