Long-term trends in the reproduction of the population

The extent to which long-term demographic trends can be accurately estimated is examined. The impact of factors such as migration, family structure, marriage and divorce patterns, and age distribution is discussed. Differences between the concepts of zero population growth and a stable population growth rate are noted. The focus is on the USSR, and comparisons with other developed countries are included.     

Human capital and the time-profile of human fertility

This is a 1st attempt at an explicitly intertemporal, microeconomic theory of the distribution of births over a woman's fertile period. The main results are that: 1) the optimal time-profile will satisfy the Hotelling rule for the depletion of a natural resource (in the present case of the women's stock of human capital at marriage); and 2) under certain simplifying assumptions, women with "high" initial endowments of human capital will have all their children in the 1st part of married life and then return to full-time employment, while women with "low" initial endowments will spread childbearing more evenly over the fertile period. It must also be pointed out that the characteristics of the optimal fertility profile might be different if utility depended directly on the profile itself--e.g., if the quality of children increased with the interval between the pregnancies, as assumed in the literature on birth spacing.     

Indian women: well-being and survival

The authors examine sex differentials in sustenance and survival in developing countries using the example of India. Lower female life expectancy at birth and the declining ratio of females to males are discussed as evidence of female deprivation. Consideration is given to the feeding, survival, and neglect of female children, to differences in use of medical facilities by sex, and to regional differences by state. This pattern of discrimination is found to persist even in urban areas.     

Migration equilibrium with price rigidity: the Harris and Todaro model revisited

The author attempts to build a general equilibrium model with migration possibilities on the lines of the Harris-Todaro model in which all the agents have explicit maximizing behavior. "Assumptions on wage-price rigidities allow consideration of various supply-demand configurations. One of the most interesting results is that policy recommendations derived from the usual Harris-Todaro model are not valid when excess supply prevails." The focus is on the situation in developing countries.     

农工联合体中的经济关系问题

在苏共第二十六次代表大会中央委员会的总结报告中强调指出,在党的农业政策中,党特别强调加强和改善农业同农工联合体各部门的关系。在农工联合基础上,农业生产专门化和集约化的现代化过程产生了多种协同生产的组织形式。这种组织形式的多样性已被证明是适当的。同时,不同形式合作生产组织的存在又难以制定调整几个生产单位组织中经济关系的统一原则,于是就出现一个原则上不同的合作形式分类问题,以及不依活动方式而区分其中每种形式所固有的一般特点问题。农工联合体包括生产中间产品的农产品企业和把这些产品加工成最终产品的企业。在几种合作生产的情况下,尽管现在提出的调整农工联合者间经济关系的办法易于推广,可是为叙述简便,我们只谈一种联合生产的情况。戈沃兹捷夫提出并经实践检验以及在工作中得到发展的方法,就是建立在此点基础之上。此法通用性很强,因为它不依其产品种类如何而能     

Class differences in marriage and fertility among Tokugawa villagers in Mino province

"This paper uses family reconstitution to derive indices of marriage and birth rates from observation of class differences in six villages on the Nobi plain (near Nagoya), [Japan]." The study covers the Tokugawa period, which lasted from 1603 to 1868.     

Can absence make a team grow stronger?

Some projects have such diverse requirements that they need a variety of specialists to work on them. But often the best-qualified specialists are scattered around the globe, perhaps at several companies. Remarkably, an extensive benchmarking study reveals, it isn't necessary to bring team members together to get their best work. In fact, they can be even more productive if they stay separated and do all their collaborating virtually. The scores of successful virtual teams the authors examined didn't have many of the psychological and practical obstacles that plagued their more traditional, face-to-face counterparts. Team members felt freer to contribute--especially outside their established areas of expertise. The fact that such groups could not assemble easily actually made their projects go faster, as people did not wait for meetings to make decisions, and individuals, in the comfort of their own offices, had full access to their files and the complementary knowledge of their local colleagues. Reaping those advantages, though, demanded shrewd management of a virtual team's work processes and social dynamics. Rather than depend on videoconferencing or e-mail, which could be unwieldy or exclusionary, successful virtual teams made extensive use of sophisticated online team rooms, where everyone could easily see the state of the work in progress, talk about the work in ongoing threaded discussions, and be reminded of decisions, rationales, and commitments. Differences were most effectively hashed out in tele-conferences, which team leaders also used to foster group identity and solidarity. When carefully managed in this way, the clash of perspectives led not to acrimony but, rather, to fundamental solutions, turning distance and diversity into competitive advantage.