Measuring Fertility Responses to Policy Measures in the German Democratic Republic

Everywhere the advent of industrial society and correspondingly high incomes has been accompanied by a fall in births. If one could only explain the fall unambiguously policy measures to counter it could be readily devised. Unfortunately there are many explanations, and from each follows a different policy prescription. If the income derived from women's work in offices and industry has become so high that they cannot afford the time to have children, then payments from the State to cover what they lose through child raising will offset that. If the obstacle is the cost of clothing and educating children to present high standards, then family allowances will serve and be much less expensive than replacing women's salaries. But if the reason for couples holding back is the danger of divorce, where the children would be a handicap to the single parent for work and for remarriage, then state subsidy is not so obviously the answer. And if the obstacle to childbearing is a shift in the culture from a familistic to an individual orientation then perhaps no affordable amount of money will induce people to have children. One could go on this way. If parents do not have children because they cannot find living premises sufficiently large for them, then housing subsidies are the answer. Some "explanations" of the fall in fertility lead to simple policy solutions; others would seem not to be amenable to any kind of policy. The inability to distinguish among competing theories of the fall of fertility means that theory cannot by itself prescribe policy. To get around the inability to understand theoretically we have resort to data. The present paper presents empirical evidence that in fact policy can make a difference. In order to do that it had first to measure the difference between fertility in West Germany and Austria on the one hand and East Germany on the other. Statistics show clearly that year by year since 1976 when policy measures were introduced in East Germany births have been higher by about half a child each year. But suppose that was due to parents just having earlier whatever number of children they were to have anyway; if this were so the rise in annual rates would be only temporary, and would have only a trifling long term effect. The authors establish that the rise in the East German rate is not of this character. And they also show that such a rise did not occur in West Germany and Austria. The measures that produced the rise included generous maternity leave, plus subsequent paid leave for working mothers, interest free marriage loans whose repayment was partly canceled on the birth or children. By concentrating on third and later children some of the benefits would have more effect on fertility for a given total expenditure. Unfortunately neither the East German authorities nor this paper's authors were able to distinguish the effect of the various elements in a somewhat heterogeneous package of policy measures, but they do show unambiguously the effect of the package as a whole

Selected Demographic Aspects of a United Germany

The paper gives a first sketch of demographic patterns in the united Germany. It primarily focuses on regional divergences in population density, age structure, sex ratio, nuptiality, fertility, mortality and natural population growth. The paper then presents data to demonstrate that the (future?) German capital, Berlin, is located far away from the demographic center of the united Germany in a sparsely populated area. To estimate the consequences of the unification for population distribution, the paper calculates the demographic gravity centers of the FRG, the GDR, and the united Germany. Finally, a locational profile of selected German cities (including Frankfurt and Berlin) is calculated to determine their demographic centrality

Some Demographic Aspects of Aging in the German Democratic Republic

If people are going to live longer, then the community will have a larger proportion of old people. This is true, but only if other things remain the same, and especially if birth rates remain the same. Rising birth rates could counteract improved survival. In fact birth rates have fallen, in the GDR as in other industrialized countries, so to the survival effect is added a low birth rate effect, and the latter is the major component of aging as it is actually occurring. What aging has taken place so far, in the GDR as elsewhere in the industrialized world, is slight compared with what is expected to take place before the new century is much advanced. The relatively high births that followed World War II are now adults moving towards the middle working years, and aging will intensity in the future. The people born in the late 1940s and 1950s offer plentiful experienced labor, and that has always been a clear advantage for production. But when technology moves very rapidly experience may become inapplicable, and the question is then whether people at middle ages can unlearn what they know and develop new skills. If they are slow to do so the shortage of young people will seriously handicap production. This and allied questions are not directly addressed in the present paper, but it does provide the demographic framework for their analysis. The population problem, wherever there is one, shows itself as tendencies that will develop their acutest form in the future. That is why so much of demography is concerned with projections or forecasts. The prospects for industry with its presently aging labor force, the prospects for the overall efficiency of the economy when large numbers start to retire about 2015, the social as well as the economic consequences of an aging society, these are the issues that underly the considerations of this paper. It is an example of fruitful collaboration between IIASA and scholars of a member country

Exploring the Relationship between Urban Form, Mobility and Social Well-Being: Towards an Interdisciplinary Field of Sustainable Urban Planning and Transport Development

This Special Issue focuses on exploring the relationship between urban form, mobility, and social well-being across neighbourhoods, cities, and regions. Understanding more about these relationships is helpful in shaping integrated sustainable urban planning and transport development strategies. There is a growing body of research examining changes in well-being in response to social and spatial interventions (e.g., inequality, social exclusion, the built environment, land use, and transport development) and behavioural changes (e.g., travel preferences). However, there is a lack of understanding of the different types of well-being (e.g., social, hedonic, eudaimonic, short-term/long-term, or individual/collective well-being, as well as the spatial nature of well-being) and the variations in their impact. Furthermore, limited attention has been paid to the standardised measurement of well-being in both quantitative and qualitative terms in the field of social sciences, particularly regarding social and eudaimonic well-being, since they are abstract concepts and thus difficult to assess accurately. Therefore, there is an urgent need to further explore the relationship between urban form, mobility, and social well-being, as well as to examine the ways in which different types of well-being can be measured by applying various advanced models and research approaches within the broad field of urban planning and transport

Demographic Changes and Their Implications on Some Aspects of Social Security in the Unified Germany: German Case Study

A comparison of the demographic past of the two German states shows that, although some important similarities remained, some demographic patterns have had a diverging tendency, With respect to aging, this has resulted in a somewhat younger age structure and a slightly more favorable demographic reproduction for East Germany. The demographic aging of the German population will continue, which at the same time will challenge the pension system. Testing different possible solutions to the pension problem, including strong inmigration, showed that there is no sole demographic answer to the problem. Instead, a combination of different measures will perform best

Super-resolving multi-photon interferences with independent light sources

We propose to use multi-photon interferences from statistically independent light sources in combination with linear optical detection techniques to enhance the resolution in imaging. Experimental results with up to five independent thermal light sources confirm this approach to improve the spatial resolution. Since no involved quantum state preparation or detection is required the experiment can be considered an extension of the Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment for spatial intensity correlations of order N>2

Pay-as-you-go LPG: A mixed-methods pilot study in urban Rwanda

2.8 billion people still cook with biomass fuels, resulting in devastating impacts on health, gender equity and the environment. Pay-as-you-go (PAYG) liquid petroleum gas (LPG) is a new technology designed to make LPG affordable for urban biomass users by allowing customers to pay for fuel in small amounts. This mixed-methods study (N = 64) combined stove usage data, cooking diaries, household interviews and telephone surveys to examine a commercial PAYG LPG pilot in Kigali. It aimed to understand how households used PAYG LPG and its potential in accelerating access to clean cooking in urban Rwanda. PAYG LPG rapidly displaced charcoal as the primary cooking fuel for the majority of participants, resulting in a mean monthly reduction in household fuel expenditure of 3240 RWF (3.50 USD) and a mean consumption of 1.2 kg/capita/month. Participants spanning all income brackets in Kigali made use of PAYG LPG. The ability to pay in smaller amounts seemed to be critical to initial adoption and sustained use during the pilot. Follow-up activities with a small subsample of participants (N = 10) found that 70% continued to use full cylinder LPG (typically 12 kg) as their primary cooking fuel in the two months after the PAYG service was withdrawn. Throughout the pilot almost all participants continued to use charcoal, which accounted for 21% of cooking events. We identified a range of drivers of fuel stacking that encompassed both cultural and practical factors such as cylinder delivery delays and taste preferences for certain foods. We conclude that PAYG LPG could contribute to the clean cooking transition in urban Rwanda, but that larger scale pilots are needed to better understand both the supply- and demand-side viability

Your phone ruins our lunch: Attitudes, norms, and valuing the interaction predict phone use and phubbing in dyadic social interactions

Phubbing-ignoring another person in order to use a smartphone instead-is an increasingly common behavior that disrupts interactions and harms relationships. Using the frameworks of the Theory of Planned Behavior and an interaction value approach, we examined driving factors of phubbing frequency. Four pre-registered predictors were tested: attitudes towards phubbing, subjective norms of phubbing, interaction value, that is, the extent of valuing a social interaction, and perceived interaction value of the partner. After having had lunch together, a total of 128 participants in 64 dyads filled out a survey assessing the four predictors. Dyadic linear mixed model analyses confirm that a more positive attitude towards phubbing increases phubbing, as well as being phubbed. Moreover, we disentangled screen-sharing time (i.e., using a phone together), phone use, co-present phone use (i.e., using a phone alone), and phubbing: we found that valuing the social interaction more decreased phone use, but not phubbing, and holding more accepting subjective norms on phubbing increased co-present phone use, but not phone use in general. We further found that the person that used their phone first, phubbed more. Overall, this research extends our understanding of the factors driving phubbing and may be fruitfully harnessed to reduce phubbing

The Birth of a "Green" Generation? Generational Dynamics of Resource Consumption Patterns

The article discusses a generational perspective on changes in lifestyles and consumption patterns that complement more traditional approaches of heterogeneity and path dependency of human behavior. An application is given, in developing a model of cohort and gender-specific diffusion of technological artifacts, applied to the case of car ownership in Germany. The article concludes with a number of research questions to address the complexities of changes in human behavior from an interdisciplinary perspective

Great Sumatra Earthquake Registers on Electrostatic Sensor

Strong electrical signals that correspond to the Mw = 9.3 earthquake of 26 December 2004, which occurred at 0058:50.7 UTC off the west coast of northern Sumatra, Indonesia, were recorded by an electrostatic sensor (a device that detects short-term variations in Earth’s electrostatic fi eld) at a seismic station in Italy, which had been installed to study the infl uence of local earthquakes on a new landslide monitoring system. Electrical signals arrived at the station practically instantaneously and were detected up to several hours before the onset of the Sumatra earthquake (Figure 1) as well as before local quakes. The corresponding seismic signals (p-waves) arrived 740 seconds after the start of the earthquake. Because the electrical signals travel at the speed of light, electrical monitoring for the global detection of very strong earthquakes could be an important tool in signifi cantly increasing the hazard alert window