Aging in Japan: Causes and Consequences - Part III: The Elderly

This survey reviews current research on the impact of present demographic trends -- population aging combined with slower overall population growth -- on Japan's elderly population and their families. Among the conclusions, which emerge, are the following: Living arrangements are a major determinant of the level of support of the elderly. In particular, the availability of care from a spouse or a child may be essential to the well being of the very old and the frail elderly. In the long run however, the importance of the family as a source of support for the elderly will decrease. This is inevitable because the share of the frail elderly population will increase and the capability of families to care for older parents will decrease. The decline in the ability of families to provide in-home care will decrease not only because of industrialization and urbanization but also because of the aging of the caregivers. The health care system in Japan is not appropriate to the needs of the elderly. There is an excess of acute care hospital-based facilities and a shortage of chronic care nursing home-based facilities. Furthermore both hospital and nursing home facilities tend to assume that the condition of the elderly can only remain the same or deteriorate. They fail to promote rehabilitation and as a result they lack the necessary human and physical resources needed to restore bedridden elderly to a more active state. Increasingly the elderly are living in independent households and are depending on their own incomes that are largely derived from wages, salaries, and pensions. Compared to the elderly of other OECD nations, the elderly of Japan are in a very strong financial position. For those over age 60, average household savings is about 200,000 Euros and their annual income of those households was about 45,000 Euros. Relative to that of all Japanese households, the average income of elderly households rose rapidly in the decade between 1975 and 1985 and since that time has remained at about that of all households. As a result there has been a marked decline in the incidence of poverty among the elderly

Policy Pathways to Health in the Russian Federation

"Policy Pathways to Health in the Russian Federation" was the name given to a project implemented in 2002-04 by IIASA in collaboration with the institute for Socio-economic Studies of Population of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The core activity of the project was organizing a workshop, held at IIASA in September 2003, at which national and international researchers and policy makers shared information and insights. Through workshop papers and discussions, sources of the poor health situation in Russia ranging from bad health behaviors to inadequate health care financing were discussed and analyzed. The focus throughout was on possible policy responses. This IIASA Interim REport presents the Proceedings of the Workshop, followed by the workshop program and list of participants given as Annexes 1 and 2. The presentations published are condensed versions of project papers available at the workshop web site www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/RMS/TACIS03/?sb=19

Aging in Japan: Causes and Consequences. Part II: Economic Issues [Revised and updated August 2002]

This survey reviews current research on the impact of present demographic trends -- population aging combined with slower overall population growth -- on Japan's economic future. Among the conclusions which emerge are the following: Japan has been successful in combining rapid economic growth with a high degree of economic equality. However as its population ages its income distribution will become more unequal. But this will be due to a greater weight given to the elderly where income is distributed most unequally. There is not likely to be any significant increase in inequality within age groups. -- Much of the research reviewed here has to do with the relationship between population aging and household savings in Japan. This research has tended (some might say narrowly) to confirm the relevance of the life cycle hypothesis, leading to the conclusion that population aging will reduce the household saving rate. There is unanimity that population aging will negatively affect government balances through the rising system dependency rate of the public pension system and, less significantly, rising health care costs. Thus, all projection exercises studied here have concluded that projected demographic trends will reduce the aggregate saving rate. -- Much less attention has been devoted to investment than to saving. All projection exercises reviewed here have concluded (or, perhaps more accurately, assumed) that the impact of demographic trends on investment will be less significant than their impact impact on saving, with the result that the current account surplus will diminish, eventually turning into a deficit. The traditional Japanese labor market system of lifetime employment, seniority-based compensation, and mandatory retirement at an early age is already coming under pressure due to aging of the labor force. The opportunity costs of distortion and institutional factors that affect the labor supply of women will rise as labor becomes scarce. Deceleration in the rate of labor force growth combined with diminishing returns to capital should be a powerful stimulus for intensified research and development activities in Japan. This activity should enable Japan to push back the frontier of industrial technology and achieve an acceleration in the rate of growth of labor and total factor productivity. That has not happened. In almost every sector and by almost every measure Japan's rate of productivity growth has been falling in recent decades. Pension reform has the potential to defuse the macroeconmic impacts of population aging, however, given the fact that 70 percent of the income of the elderly comes from the public pension system, the distributional impacts are likely to be large. In the past four-fifths of public pensions are wage-indexed. At that time pension system contribution rates were essentially delinked from productivity growth under current arrangements. Another way of looking at this is that, as population aging and productivity gains raised wage rates, pensions rise "pari passu" and contribution rates must rise as well

Aging in Japan: Causes and Consequences. Part I: Demographic Issues [Revised and updated August 2002]

This paper reviews demographic issues related to the aging of the population of Japan. Among its findings are: -- The aging of the Japanese population has little to do with "aging of the baby boom generation" as in countries such as the United States, because the baby boom was only three years long. It is rather, almost entirely due to low fertility. -- Recent fertility decline in Japan have reflected not so much declining marital fertility as decline in the proportion of women of childbearing age who are married. This is due mostly to rising age at first marriage and increased lifetime celibacy although the rising divorce rate also plays a role. -- The reluctance of young women to marry and raise children can be explained in terms of rising opportunity costs, particularly opportunity costs associated with the labor market. At the same time that costs of childbearing are rising, the benefits appear to be declining. A falling share of women report that they expect to rely on their children for age support and a surprisingly low proportion -- only 9 percent of mothers of 0-14 year olds, as opposed to 40-70 percent in other industrial countries -report that they derive pleasure from child rearing. As attitudes toward non-marital sex become more permissive, the benefits to be derived from entering into marriage are also falling. -- While mortality improvements play a secondary role in population aging (compared to low fertility), they have potentially significant impacts on health care costs and the demand for long-term care. -- Though it would be technically possible to prevent the aging or decline of the Japanese population by allowing increased international migration, the levels required to halt population decline and population aging would be immense. Such large inflows are not currently permitted nor are they likely to be permitted in the future

Educationalization of Social Problems and the Educationalization of the Modern World

The catchword ‘educationalization,’ which enjoyed some popularity around 1920, has been used increasingly since the 1980s, first in the German and then in the Belgian and English discussions. Although the uses of and intentions behind the term are far from identical, they all express a perceived intersection between distinct social practices, one of which is education. As a rule, this intersection is interpreted as assigning education the task of coping with perceived social problems. Accordingly, the most popular expression of this mode of thought has been labeled, in an abstracting way, the educationalization of social problems. This entry builds on that but suggests a more comprehensive view, less reactive in character, by claiming that since the 18th century, the construction of modernity, progress, and open future depends on an idea of education that promises to be the engine of modernity by means of (new) and broadly disseminated knowledge and technologies and, at the same time, an instance of moral reassurance empowering the individual exposed to these modern conditions and their moral hazards to act morally or virtuously. Educationalization of the modern world, in this more comprehensive way, is a key concept for understanding and deciphering the grand narratives of modernity and the modern self

Improving phylogeny reconstruction at the strain level using peptidome datasets

Typical bacterial strain differentiation methods are often challenged by high genetic similarity between strains. To address this problem, we introduce a novel in silico peptide fingerprinting method based on conventional wet-lab protocols that enables the identification of potential strain-specific peptides. These can be further investigated using in vitro approaches, laying a foundation for the development of biomarker detection and application-specific methods. This novel method aims at reducing large amounts of comparative peptide data to binary matrices while maintaining a high phylogenetic resolution. The underlying case study concerns the Bacillus cereus group, namely the differentiation of Bacillus thuringiensis, Bacillus anthracis and Bacillus cereus strains. Results show that trees based on cytoplasmic and extracellular peptidomes are only marginally in conflict with those based on whole proteomes, as inferred by the established Genome-BLAST Distance Phylogeny (GBDP) method. Hence, these results indicate that the two approaches can most likely be used complementarily even in other organismal groups. The obtained results confirm previous reports about the misclassification of many strains within the B. cereus group. Moreover, our method was able to separate the B. anthracis strains with high resolution, similarly to the GBDP results as benchmarked via Bayesian inference and both Maximum Likelihood and Maximum Parsimony. In addition to the presented phylogenomic applications, whole-peptide fingerprinting might also become a valuable complementary technique to digital DNA-DNA hybridization, notably for bacterial classification at the species and subspecies level in the future.This research was funded by Grant AGL2013-44039-R from the Spanish “Plan Estatal de I+D+I”, and by Grant EM2014/046 from the “Plan Galego de investigación, innovación e crecemento 2011-2015”. BS was recipient of a Ramón y Cajal postdoctoral contractfrom the Spanish Ministry of Economyand Competitiveness. This work was also partially funded by the [14VI05] Contract-Programme from the University of Vigo and the Agrupamento INBIOMED from DXPCTSUG-FEDER unha maneira de facer Europa (2012/273).The research leading to these results has also received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/REGPOT-2012-2013.1 under grant agreement n˚ 316265, BIOCAPS. This document reflects only the authors’ views and the European Union is not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained herein. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript

«La relation de limitation et d’exception dans le français d’aujourd’hui : excepté, sauf et hormis comme pivots d’une relation algébrique »

L’analyse des emplois prépositionnels et des emplois conjonctifs d’ “excepté”, de “sauf” et d’ “hormis” permet d’envisager les trois prépositions/conjonctions comme le pivot d’un binôme, comme la plaque tournante d’une structure bipolaire. Placées au milieu du binôme, ces prépositions sont forcées par leur sémantisme originaire dûment métaphorisé de jouer le rôle de marqueurs d’inconséquence systématique entre l’élément se trouvant à leur gauche et celui qui se trouve à leur droite. L’opposition qui surgit entre les deux éléments n’est donc pas une incompatibilité naturelle, intrinsèque, mais extrinsèque, induite. Dans la plupart des cas (emplois limitatifs), cette opposition prend la forme d’un rapport entre une « classe » et le « membre (soustrait) de la classe », ou bien entre un « tout » et une « partie » ; dans d’autres (emplois exceptifs), cette opposition se manifeste au contraire comme une attaque de front portée par un « tout » à un autre « tout ». De plus, l’inconséquence induite mise en place par la préposition/conjonction paraît, en principe, tout à fait insurmontable. Dans l’assertion « les écureuils vivent partout, sauf en Australie » (que l’on peut expliciter par « Les écureuils vivent partout, sauf [qu’ils ne vivent pas] en Australie »), la préposition semble en effet capable d’impliquer le prédicat principal avec signe inverti, et de bâtir sur une telle implication une sorte de sous énoncé qui, à la rigueur, est totalement inconséquent avec celui qui le précède (si « les écureuils ne vivent pas en Australie », le fait qu’ils « vivent partout » est faux). Néanmoins, l’analyse montre qu’alors que certaines de ces oppositions peuvent enfin être dépassées, d’autres ne le peuvent pas. C’est, respectivement, le cas des relations limitatives et des relations exceptives. La relation limitative, impliquant le rapport « tout » - « partie », permet de résoudre le conflit dans les termes d’une somme algébrique entre deux sous énoncés pourvus de différent poids informatif et de signe contraire. Les valeurs numériques des termes de la somme étant déséquilibrées, le résultat est toujours autre que zéro. La relation exceptive, au contraire, qui n’implique pas le rapport « tout » - « partie », n’est pas capable de résoudre le conflit entre deux sous énoncés pourvus du même poids informatif et en même temps de signe contraire : les valeurs numériques des termes de la somme étant symétriques et égales, le résultat sera toujours équivalent à zéro