Population Studies

This paper analyzes the evolution of Spanish migration along the history, emphasizing that the current crisis has not many differences from the past. The problem of emigration is considered as the result of inherited aspects of the past, as it is, through lack of foresight of production model. Many of the present conditions in the emigration of yesteryear are being played today, with one main difference, the high qualifications of current migrants off the low qualification above.

W ostatnich latach gwałtownie wzrasta odsetek osób starszych w populacji.
Długość życia zwiększyła się, zaś prognozy demograficzne wskazują, że na
przestrzeni najbliższych 50 lat liczba osób po 60. roku życia wzrośnie 5-krotnie.
Oczekiwana długość życia Polaków w okresie 1990-2006 wydłużyła się
średnio o 4 lata i przewiduje się, że będzie to życie krótsze niż statystycznego
Europejczyka, zaś różnice dotyczyć będą także oczekiwanej długości życia
w dobrym zdrowiu. Wiąże się to z wdrażaniem mierników służących ocenie
stanu zdrowia populacji. Do podstawowych wskaźników oceniających sytuację
zdrowotną ludności należy wskaźnik umieralności i pochodne mu wskaźniki
opierające się na liczbie i przyczynach zgonów, aczkolwiek z uwagi na problemy
wynikające z braku pełnego obiektywizmu przy ich wyznaczaniu, coraz
częściej określa się wskaźniki włączające zgony oraz inne skutki zdrowotne. Do
współczynników tych należą między innymi: oczekiwana długość życia, lata
przeżyte w zdrowiu, utracona długość życia skorygowana niepełnosprawnością,
oczekiwana długość życia w zdrowiu, potencjalna liczba utraconych lat życia
oraz lata życia skorygowane jakością. Głównymi, często wykorzystywanymi
miarami służącymi ocenie sytuacji zdrowotnej ludności są przede wszystkim:
oczekiwana długość życia – Life Expectancy (LE) czyli przeciętna liczba lat
życia, mierzona w oparciu o statystyki dotyczące umieralności w danym
roku, dla danej populacji i współczynnik lat przeżytych w zdrowiu – Healthy
Life Years (HLY), nazywany również współczynnikiem oczekiwanej długości
życia bez niepełnosprawności. Współczynniki oczekiwanej długości życia i lat
przeżytych w zdrowiu należą do podstawowych miar służących ocenie sytuacji
zdrowotnej populacji we wszystkich krajach.

All modern governments are concerned with population and its management; they
pursue a variety of policies in order to deal with demographic conditions adequately. One of
the countries that seriously adopted population policies—especially birth control policy—in
the late 20th century is Iran. Different studies stress that the population growth policy in the
first half of the 1980s and the population control policy in the late 1980s and 1990s in Iran
were influenced by the predicament the country found itself in during the war with Iraq and
after the war, as well as the necessity of population management to renew human resources
during the war and perform development and reconstruction plans properly after the war. This
study claims that adopting such policies has not been due to a full understanding of real situations, but largely has been influenced by meta-forces i.e. political and ideological discourses
that governed the country. In fact governing discourses actually determine the policies and
their courses, rather than changes in policy-makers’ understanding of real conditions in the
society. This study indicates that since the Islamic Revolution, different discourses, including Islamic Idealism, Islamic Pragmatism, Islamic realism and Principlism, have governed
Iran; consequently different population policies consistent with these discourses have been
followed. In other words, this study tries to show that discursive attitudes seem to account
more adequately for population policies in Iran than positivistic attitudes.

In this paper, we argue that target-driven population policy enables the return of technical solutions to reproductive health challenges in the form of long-acting reversible contraception (LARC). We examine two Family Planning 2020 (FP2020) commitments related to promotion of the injectable contraceptive Sayana Press and the implant Jadelle. These efforts reintroduce controversial contraceptive methods (Depo-Provera and Norplant); involve public-private partnerships between donors, governments, NGOs and Big Pharma; and facilitate capital accumulation from contraceptive sales in the global South. We employ a demopopulationist lens to highlight the use of neo-Malthusian ideology to justify reducing population growth and engineering population composition. In a geopopulationist frame, Sayana Press and Jadelle reinforce unequal geographies in which the Global North serves as a space of technological innovation and policy-making, and the poorest countries in the Global South, including many in Africa, serve as the laboratory for clinical trials, interventions in fertility, and capital extraction. Finally, the way these contraceptive technologies are promoted harks back to the biopopulationist promise of improving life itself.

A re we running out of resources? That's been a hotly debated question since the publication of Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb in 1968. The Stanford University biologist warned that population growth would result in the exhaustion of resources and a global catastrophe. University of Maryland economist Julian Simon, in contrast, argued that humans would innovate their way out of resource shortages. He believed that people were the "ultimate resource" that would make other resources more plentiful. In this paper, we revisit the main points of contention in the debate regarding availability of resources and their relationship with population growth. Using the latest price data for 50 foundational commodities covering energy, food, materials, and metals, we propose a new way of measuring resource availability based on four concepts. First, the time-price of commodities allows us to measure the cost of resources in terms of human labor. We find that, in terms of global average hourly income, commodity prices fell by 64.7 percent between 1980 and 2017. Second, the price elasticity of population (PEP) allows us to measure sensitivity of resource availability to population growth. We find that the time-price of commodities declined by 0.934 percent for every 1 percent increase in the world's population over the same time period. Third, we develop the Simon Abundance Framework, which uses the PEP values to distinguish between different degrees of resource abundance, from decreasing abundance at one end to superabundance at the other end. Considering that the time-price of commodities decreased at a faster proportional rate than population increased, we find that humanity is experiencing superabundance. Fourth, we create the Simon Abundance Index, which uses the time-price of commodities and change in global population to estimate overall resource abundance. We find that the planet's resources became 379.6 percent more abundant between 1980 and 2017. On the basis of our analysis of the relationship between resource availability and population growth, we forecast that the time-price of commodities could fall by a further 29 percent over the next 37 years. Much will depend on policies and institutions that nations pursue. For the time-price of commodities to decline and resource abundance to increase, it is necessary for market incentives and the price mechanism to endure. When prices of commodities temporarily increase, people have an incentive to use resources more efficiently, increase their supply, and develop cheaper substitutes.

There are situations in survey sampling where the study characters are sensitive. Due to the sensitivity of characters, practitioners don't get the actual response. Randomized response technique (RRT) models are developed to reduce the bias raised by an evasive response on the sensitive variable. The measurement error (ME) is usually always present in the surveys so we need to study the RRT models with ME. We propose an estimator to predict the population mean of a sensitive variable in the influence of ME. The properties of the proposed estimator are studied and comparisons are made with the existing estimators. At last, a simulation study is executed to illustrate the results numerically.