A diminishing population whose every cohort more than replaces itself

We observe that a dynamic population model can have period fertility that is always below replacement and cohort fertility that is always above replacement. We ask whether such a paradoxical population will get larger or smaller, and show that it must become smaller. Cohort replacement does not imply population replacement, and emphasizing fertility timing and cohort fertility ignores the issue of relative cohort size. The resolution of this apparent paradox reinforces the importance of the level of period fertility in demographic analysis.Bongaarts-Feeney adjusted fertility, cohort, cohort fertility, dynamic population model, fertility, fertility timing, period fertility

Estimating multistate transition rates from population distributions

The ability to estimate transition rates (or probabilities) from population distributions has many potential applications in demography. Iterative Proportional Fitting (IPF) has been used for such estimation, but lacks a meaningful behavioral, or demographic, foundation. Here a new approach, Relative State Attractiveness (RSA), is advanced. It assumes that states become more (or less) attractive, and that rates respond accordingly. The RSA estimation procedure is developed and applied to model and actual data where the underlying rates are known. Results show that RSA provides accurate estimates under a wide range of conditions, usually yielding values similar to those produced by IPF. Both methods are then applied to U.S. data to provide new estimates of interregional migration between the years 1980 and 1990.entropy, estimation techniques, iterative proportional fitting, multistate models

Skortur og heilsa Íslendinga fyrir og eftir bankahrun

Í kjölfar hruns íslensku bankanna árið 2008 urðu töluverðar breytingar á íslensku samfélagi. Tekjudreifing breyttist þegar kaupmáttur lækkaði mikið í kjölfar falls krónunnar. Á sama tíma minnkaði ójöfnuður m.a. vegna samþjöppunar í efri hluta tekjudreifingar. Í greininni er lagt mat á hugsanleg áhrif þessara breytinga á heilsu fólks. Stuðst er við kenningar um félagslegan samanburð til að greina tengsl milli skorts og heilsu fólks árin 2007, 2009 og 2012 með gögnum rannsóknaraðarinnar Heilsa og líðan Íslendinga. Öll þrjú árin sýna tölfræðilega marktæk samvirkniáhrif milli hlutlægs skorts, afstæðs skorts og mats á eigin líkamlegri heilsu. Þessi samvirkniáhrif breyttust ekki marktækt yfir tíma. Þó að bæði afstæður og hlutlægur skortur hafi aukist milli ára hafa þær breytingar ekki haft áhrif á mat fólks á eigin líkamlegri heilsu. Mögulega hafa áhrif kreppunnar á mati fólks á eigin heilsu ekki komið fyllilega fram. Hins vegar er mikilvægt að hafa í huga að bæði í þenslunni fyrir hrun, sem og í kjölfar falls bankanna, eru merkjanleg tengsl milli skorts og heilsu.In the wake of the collapse of the Icelandic banks in 2008, considerable changes were observed in Icelandic society. The national income distribution changed as purchasing power diminished with the collapse of the national currency. At the same time less income inequality is observed, due to compression at the upper tail of the income distribution. In this article, the potential impact of these changes on people’s health is estimated. Based on theories of social comparison, the relationship between deprivation and health is analyzed with 2007, 2009 and 2012 data from the national health study, Heilsa og líðan Íslendinga (Health and Wellbeing of Icelanders). In all three years, statistically significant interactive relationship is observed between absolute and relative deprivation and self-assessed physical health. These interaction effects do not change significantly over time. While both absolute and relative deprivation have increased after the 2008 collapse, people’s self-assessed physical health has not changed nor has the crisis had a direct effect on people’s physical health. However, it is important to note that a significant relationship is observed between deprivation and health, both during economic growth, and after the collapse of the Icelandic banks.Embætti landlæknisRitrýnt tímaritPeer rewieve

The Complexity of Planning Revisited - A Parameterized Analysis

The early classifications of the computational complexity of planning under various restrictions in STRIPS (Bylander) and SAS+ (Baeckstroem and Nebel) have influenced following research in planning in many ways. We go back and reanalyse their subclasses, but this time using the more modern tool of parameterized complexity analysis. This provides new results that together with the old results give a more detailed picture of the complexity landscape. We demonstrate separation results not possible with standard complexity theory, which contributes to explaining why certain cases of planning have seemed simpler in practice than theory has predicted. In particular, we show that certain restrictions of practical interest are tractable in the parameterized sense of the term, and that a simple heuristic is sufficient to make a well-known partial-order planner exploit this fact.Comment: (author's self-archived copy

Inflation, Markups and Monetary Policy

The correlation between persistent changes in the markup in one sector of an economy and the inflation rate is quantified in a 2-sector dynamic general equilibrium model. How this relationship is affected by monetary policy is also studied. We find that the correlation is in general positive under an exogenous money growth rule as well as under an inflation targeting rule. That is, a decrease of the markup leads to a decrease in the CPI-inflation rate. However, if inflation is measured by an optimal price index that also includes the wage rate the correlation is slightly negative. That is, a decrease in the markup leads to higher inflation rates. This is due to higher wage rates. The correlation is sensitive to whether the policy rule includes an output term. If monetary policy accommodates output strongly the correlation is negative. A decrease in the markup leads to higher inflation rates, as measured by both the CPI and the optimal price index

Eurafrica

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. In order to think theoretically about our global age it is important to understand how the global has been conceived historically. 'Eurafrica' was an intellectual endeavor and political project that from the 1920s saw Europe's future survival - its continued role in history - as completely bound up with Europe's successful merger with Africa. In its time the concept of Eurafrica was tremendously influential in the process of European integration. Today the project is largely forgotten, yet the idea continues to influence EU policy towards its African 'partner'. The book will recover a critical conception of the nexus between Europe and Africa - a relationship of significance across the humanities and social sciences. In assessing this historical concept the authors shed light on the process of European integration, African decolonization and the current conflictual relationship between Europe and Africa

Building Eurafrica: Reviving Colonialism through European Integration, 1920-1960

This paper examines the history of the ‘Eurafrican project’ as it evolved from the Pan‐ European movement in the 1920s to its institutionalization in the European Economic Community (EEC) (i.e. today’s EU) in the late 1950s. As we show, practically all of the visions, movements and concrete institutional arrangements working towards European integration during this period placed Africa’s incorporation into the European enterprise as a central objective. As so much of the scholarly, political and journalistic accounts at the time testify to, European integration was inextricably bound up with a Eurafrican project. According to the intellectual, political and institutional discourse on Eurafrica—or the fate of Europe’s colonial enterprise—a future European community presupposed the transformation of the strictly national colonial projects into a joint European colonization of Africa. There is strong evidence to support that this project was instrumental in the actual, diplomatic and political constitution of the EEC, or of Europe as a political subject. According to our thesis, the origins of the EU cannot be separated from the perceived necessity to preserve and reinvigorate the colonial system. On a second level the paper also introduces a broader historiographic problematic in which we position Eurafrica as the wider but by now forgotten formation that shaped Europe and Africa and their relations to one another in the greater part of the twentieth century. Eurafrica conditioned both the integration of Europe and the political landscape in postcolonial Africa. We are thus able to shift the terrain upon which most if not all scholarly analyses of the political, economic and ideological developments on the two continents have taken place up until now. Eurafrica is the forgotten geopolitical context that must be reconstructed in order for us to resolve a set of crucial historical and political problems. Questioning the historical framework usually employed in EU studies, our intervention emphasizes the radically different geopolitical designs for the postwar world order that was encoded in the Eurafrican project. Finally, we also show how these Eurafrican designs continue to influence current relations between Europe and Africa