Population Aging and the Possibility of a Middle-Income Trap in Asia

We present three conditions for a demography-driven middle-income trap and show that many economies in East, South, and Southeast Asia satisfy all of them. The conditions involve (1) the support ratio of workers to consumers has an impact on economic growth, (2) economic development accompanies more investment in human capital and lower fertility due to the quantity–quality trade-off, and (3) a current low level of fertility corresponds to very low support ratios for keeping up with frontier economies in the long run. Panel analysis for 178 countries shows that (1) and (2) are satisfied for Asia with higher elasticity than others. As for (3), we set up a dynamic model for simulations, showing that approximately two-third of Asia’s developing countries have an unsustainable level of support ratios, implying possibility of a middle-income trap due to future demographic headwinds.     

Migrant remittances and fertility

This study examines the role of migrants’ remittances in developing countries’ fertility transition. Employing an unbalanced panel of South Asian countries and controlling for various economic and socio-demographic factors, we find that remittances are significantly associated with a lower number of children born to women of childbearing age. This suggests the remittances’ substitution effect to be at play rather than the income effect, and may result from decreased need for children for financing the household’s future needs as well as from better access to healthcare and contraceptive methods available to migrant households. Remittances’ association with fertility appears to be more important than the transfer of fertility norms from migrants’ host countries. The monetary aspects of international migration may therefore be more important for the region’s demographic transition than social remittances.     

The geography of urbanization — Sweden and Finland,c. 1570–1770

Abstract

In this article Swedish urbanization is considered as a long term growth cycle. The urban system expanded both geographically and demographically during the seventeenth century. Many new towns were founded, and urban growth rates were generally high. Swedish urban geography was characterized by peripheral expansion mainly towards northern Sweden. At the same time there was a strong tendency towards the centralization of urban resources. The capital city, Stockholm, evolved from being a medium-sized town to becoming a city worthy of Sweden s great power status. During the eighteenth century several of the seventeenth century trends were reversed: the centralising tendency ended and indeed regressed, while general urban growth slowed down, turning into an ‘urban growth from below’. Stockholm became a stagnation metropolis' and the eastern-central part of Sweden experienced an urban setback relative to western Sweden, where several towns, including Gothenburg, profited from their close connections with the expansive markets of northern and western Europe.     

职业成长对员工建言行为的影响

基于员工利益视角,整合社会交换理论与关系人口学理论,并探索性地引入员工与主管前摄性人格匹配,可深入研究职业成长对员工建言行为的作用机理。运用多元线性回归分析多个组织的335份员工-主管配对样本数据,结果表明：职业成长对员工建言行为具有正向影响,员工对组织的责任感知在职业成长与建言行为间起到中介作用,员工-主管前摄性人格匹配不仅正向调节职业成长对建言行为的作用,而且正向调节责任感知对建言行为的作用。     

Brakes on Chinese Development: Institutional Causes of a Growth Slowdown

China has enjoyed spectacular economic growth since the 1980s. Economic models based on production functions typically suggest that China's rapid growth will continue at similarly high rates, but they ignore pressing structural and institutional constraints on its development. Among the problems identified in this paper, we point to an impending demographic shift that will greatly increase the number of economic dependents, the inadequate corporate legal foundation for indigenous private enterprise, and the discriminatory, defective and disruptive system of land tenure. These issues point to a pressing agenda of institutional reform to help China develop in future decades. Reforms have to concentrate on political structures, state efficiency, incentives to educate and train migrant workers, land tenure, and on private enterprise.     

The propensity to exit and innovation

In offering an answer to the question, “Who exits and why?”, I introduce a model relating the decision to remain in, or exit from an industry, to conditions of demand and the underlying technology. In particular, I argue that two elements of technology are important — the role of scale economies in an industry and the extent to which the underlying technological information conditions can be characterized by either an entrepreneurial or a routinized regime. Based on the evidence from over 300 U.S. manufacturing industries, I conclude that the process of firm selection and industry evolution tends to conform either to the model of the revolving door, where the bulk of exiting businesses are new entrants, or else the metaphor of the forest, where incumbent establishments tend to be displaced by new entrants.     

PEOPLING THE VICTORIAN GOLDFIELDS: FROM BOOM TO BUST, 1851–1901

Victoria experienced a surge of migration after the discovery of gold in 1851. I explore the social and geographic background of migrants lured to the colony by opportunities opened up by gold mining. When alluvial gold was exhausted, the skills of migrants enabled them to exploit the more difficult deep lead and quartz reef gold deposits and to establish cities and towns. Urban growth was encouraged by high marriage and birth rates in the 1860s. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century goldfields communities generally suffered economic and demographic declines.     

THE THOMBO TREASURE. COLONIAL POPULATION ADMINISTRATION AS SOURCE FOR THE HISTORICAL DEMOGRAPHY OF EARLY MODERN SRI LANKA

During their occupation of Sri Lanka (1640–1796) and following Sinhalese and Portuguese practices, the Dutch created an elaborate registration of people, estates, and labour services. The administrative records known as the thombos are incomparable in their level of detail, yet they have hardly been used for the purposes of demographic or economic history. This article describes the challenges involved in ‘decoding’ the thombos, that is, reconstructing the meaning of particular variables in the light of the prevailing legal pluralism in which Sinhalese common law and Roman-Dutch law co-existed uncomfortably. It also summarises research findings from a pilot study involving about two hundred small villages in Colombo province. Finally, it sketches research horizons, as the thombo ‘treasure’ holds great prospects for (comparative) studies into family systems and the impact of colonial rule on fertility and mortality.     

Crowding,satiation, and saturation: The days of television series' lives

The performance of firms depends not just on the structure of the industries in which they compete but also on their relative positioning within those industries, in terms of operating within particular niches. We propose that demand for these niches depends endogenously on the historical ecology of the products offered: Niches become saturated—reduced in their ability to support products—as a large number of previous offerings allows the audience to satisfy its desire for products of a particular type. Analyzing the survival rates of television series aired in the United States from 1946 to 2003, we found that the survival rates of future entrants fell with the extensiveness of recent offerings in the niche, and that the negative association between crowding and survival also weakened with this saturation. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Migration,Ethnicity, and the Educational Gradient in the Jakarta Mega-Urban Region: A Spatial Analysis

The Jakarta mega-urban region (MUR) is one of the largest such regions in the world. In this article, we revisit Castles’s seminal 1967 article, based on the 1961 Population Census of Indonesia, on the educational and ethnic composition of Jakarta. Using data from the full-count 2010 Population Census, we examine spatial patterns in the educational gradients of the population across the Jakarta MUR and look to determine whether these patterns can be explained by internal migration and ethnic composition at the kecamatan (subdistrict) level. We find that population movement from the core to the outer areas has softened the historically extremely sharp gradation in educational attainment across the MUR. We show the dominance of the Sundanese and Bantenese ethnic groups in the rural hinterlands of the MUR, where the average educational attainment is relatively low, and note this question of rurality versus ethnicity when interpreting our results.