Population and development

This paper presents an analysis of a recent elaboration process of population policies and development conducted in Uruguay, a demographically small middle-income country that has aged early, with a very advanced demographic transition and fertility rates below replacement levels since 2004. Towards 1930 Uruguay had already culminated its demographic transition, with comparatively low gross birth and mortality rates as compared with the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean. As a result, the population’s age structure already showed important signs of aging by 1950, and this continued deepening further to date. The economic restrictions faced by the political responses are greater than those of industrialized countries which have experienced similar demographic processes. The strong financial pressures on the retirement and health systems, and in more general terms the concern of the political elites’ regarding the country’s demographic sustainability determined the generation of a new institutional environment related with the design of population policies. This paper resorts to a collection of laws, programs and actions, together with the rationales detailed in the corresponding accompanying statements of intent, in order to analyze these innovations with the contexts and reasons that contributed to foster them.

Achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) by 2015 is one of the greatest challenges, faced by the developing countries including India, in present times. Also, there is a large disparity across and within the states and rural urban population in key demographic and socio-economic indicators. In this context, the aim of this paper is to examine the progress in achieving the millennium development goals related to poverty, education and health, in India and states. The paper utilized data from multiple sources- National Family and Health Surveys-II and III, Sample Registration System, Elementary education in India, District Information System for Education (DISE) 2009-10 and MDG India Country Report 2011. The percentage of poor below the poverty line is estimated at 26.7% by 2015, against the target of 23.9%. Net Enrolment Ratio (NER) is likely to achieve by 2015 but the quality of education is still questionable. The third and fourth goal that targets to reduce child and maternal mortality falls short of 10 percentage points in case of under 5 mortality and 30 percentage points in case of maternal mortality.

Poverty trap persists in many resource-poor regions due to various specific causes. A unique poverty trap occurs in the so-called ‘Beggars’ Village’ in Sumenep Regency, Indonesia. Unlike beggars Pragaan Daya village. The main occupation of the villagers is begging. In the view of most cultures in Indonesia, begging is bad and unrespectful, but the community in Pragaan Daya village was the exception. Begging had been their intergenerational profession. This research aimed to determine root causes of the begging culture in Pragaan Daya Village. This paper was based on qualitative research using Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) approach to reveal these socio-economic problems. The research found that internal variables which affected cultural poverty trap in the village were: daily income obtained from begging; existance of village market; land topography; awareness in education; teaching and learning environment; fertility of farmland;water resources and; irrigation system, while the external variables were:government’s attention; farmland extensivication and education cost. Based on the finding we reccommended that local development must be equitable which means economic development that respond social development and vise versa.
Key Words: cultural poverty trap, PRA approach, beggar, local development.

An attempt has been made to examine the impact of economic crisis on children of minority community at micro level, and to explore likely situation to evolve and ongoing responses and recommendations to mitigate sufferings and improve livelihood options. Before crisis, in 88 percent of poor households, at least one person per family had migrated as survival strategies. With onset of crisis, these households have affected adversely by fall in remittances. They are also affected by second-run effects on informal employment and depressed local economy. The deterioration of households’ economic situation is translating into poorer diet and decreased expenditure on children’s health and education, more poverty and debt, and engagement into low-earning, informal income earning activities. The main coping mechanisms adapted are reduced quality and quantity of food consumed, withdrawal of children from school and pushing them in labour, and curtailing health expenditure. Interventions in response to crisis should not only mitigate immediate effects on children in poor households but also continue to tackle basic causes of poverty and food insecurity, including improvement of services (health, water, sanitation, and education), infrastructures, agricultural productivity and access to credit.

This study assessed the association between employment, chronic disease prevalence and medical care aspects of older population in India .Study have used India Human Development Survey (IHDS, 2005). The assessment of employment by background characteristics reveals that greater proportion of lower socio-economic groups and belonging to rural areas are working at older ages. Moreover importantly, findings suggested a bi-directional relationship between employment and chronic diseases in older population: Older population engaged in regular paid work has lower likelihood of suffering from chronic disease (OR=0.845; p<0.01) compared to people who are not working (OR=1.00); in alternative words, older persons suffering from chronic diseases are unable to work in regular paid jobs. Similarly, greater proportions of not-working older persons, those are suffering with chronic diseases and have monetary support through retirement pension and savings from previous job are seeking more modern treatment and expense on treatment of chronic diseases. Hence, the results fosters that ‘employment determines and is determined by chronic disease prevalence among older population in India’. These results would allow policy makers to greater ascertain the health care and financial needs, alternative social protection programs, and develop appropria

The empirical gap that necessitates the research question is that, in spite of the fact that well over 90% of rural communities in Ivory Coast is sufficiently covered by the Global System of Mobile Communication (GSM), majority of rural women farmers are not making use of the facility in the process of food production, transportation and distribution in the country. This study aims to diagnose the impact of the use of GSM in the balance of information between producers of food made by women in the west-central Côte d'Ivoire (area of high agricultural production) and the urban cities surrounding, in view of the distribution and improving rural women life-being. The results of the research are about the perception of mobile phone, the level of mobile phone used by women in commercial works, the contribution of mobile phones in improving their revenues and the distribution of food between the city and countryside in Ivory Coast is diagnosed.

The importance of remittance is well known. The aim of this paper is to find out characteristics of internal and international migrants who send remittances, to find out influence of remittances on household income and understand use pattern of remittance by receiving households. To achieve above objectives data are derived from National Sample Survey of conducted during 2007-08 and India Human Development Survey of 2005. Both surveys are large scale survey conducted all over country on representative sample basis. From these sources information on age, sex, place of origin and destination, amount of remittances and use pattern are analyzed.

The analysis uses information on out-migrants who moved within and outside country. The results shows large volumes of out-migrants are internal but remittances received from emigrants are much higher. The mobility among lower social groups is less and similarly less amount of remittances. The higher economic group reported higher mobility rate within and outside country. The remittance increases with increase in economic status of households. The analysis of these two survey shows that benefit of migration in India is reaped by socially and economically better off. High proportion of household reported spending on food items followed by education and health care.

This paper uses two classes of multidimensional indices to measure countries’ evolution towards the achievement of United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Our results suggest that improvements in the different MDGs tend to be uncorrelated among them and, on average, countries are largely off-track in their way towards MDGs achievement. This evolution has been highly uneven across countries and dimensions. While population growth is negatively associated to countries’ MDGs improvement, the latter is unrelated to countries’ economic growth, therefore posing a great challenge for international development agencies and national governments who aim to promote simultaneous progress in the different MDGs.

Is foreign migration able to compensate the low fertility and to prevent the population decrease and the population ageing? It has been demonstrated that the annual number of immigrants needed to restrict the decline in the population size is relatively small while the number of immigrants preventing the population ageing had to be unrealistically high. The article shows, which extent of migration would be necessary to stabilize the size and the sex-and-age structure of the population of the Czech Republic in the sense of the convergence to the modified stationary population model which assumes decrease in the number of live births corresponding to the decreasing mortality. While in the case of increase in fertility the annual numbers of migrants necessary for the convergence are relatively small, in the case of stabilizing fertility at the present low level the numbers of migrants seem to be unrealistically high.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the population of Japan began to decline, after reaching its peak of 128 million with the highest proportion of the elderly in the world. As witnessed its drastic shift to a new population regime, here we introduce the new concept of “post-demographic transitional phase” for Japan. In this paper, first, we give a characterization of the “post-demographic transitional phase,” rethinking classical theories of demographic transition. Second, we examine demographic indicators which show when and how Japan entered this new era, concluding that the shift occurred between the middle of the 1970s and the late 2000s as a process of inescapable event chain. Third, we illustrate that this shift is closely associated with the socioeconomic, cultural and even political changes prominent in its recent history. We are now faced with many difficult problems such as a rise in underemployment associating with marriage squeeze among youths, an increase in poor single households particularly among the elderly, and economic downturns and fears of a financial crisis at the national level. The study of the post-demographic transition of Japan from both theoretical and empirical aspects is imperative because the other Asian countries seem to follow the same dynamics.