A New Look at the Asian Fertility Transition

The significance of the Asian fertility transition can hardly be overestimated. The relatively sanguine view of population growth expressed at the 1994 International Conference for Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo was possible only because of the demographic events in Asia over the last 30 years. In 1965 Asian women were still bearing about six children. Even at current rates, today’s young women will give birth to half as many. This measure, namely the average number of live births over a reproductive lifetime, is called the total fertility rate. It has to be above 2— considerably above if mortality is still high—to achieve long-term population replacement. By 1995 East Asia, taken as a whole, exhibited a total fertility rate of 1.9. Elsewhere, Singapore was below long-term replacement, Thailand had just achieved it, and Sri Lanka was only a little above. The role of Asia in the global fertility transition is shown by estimates I made a few years ago for a World Bank Planning Meeting covering the first quarter of a century of the Asian transition [Caldwell (1993), p. 300]. Between 1965 and 1988 the world’s annual birth rate fell by 22 percent. In 1988 there would have been 40 million more births if there had been no decline from 1965 fertility levels. Of that total decline in the world’s births, almost 80 percent had been contributed by Asia, compared with only 10 percent by Latin America, nothing by Africa, and, unexpectedly, 10 percent by the high-income countries of the West. Indeed, 60 percent of the decline was produced by two countries, China and India, even though they constitute only 38 percent of the world’s population. They accounted, between them, for over threequarters of Asia’s fall in births.

THE ROLE OF EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY

Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Intergeneration Transfers and Retiring Farmers

The percentage of farmers who are approaching retirement age is increasing. The census of agriculture shows that in 2001 there were a larger percentage of farmers over 55 years of age than was the case in the previous censuses. The transferring of the assets held by these farmers to the next generation has important policy implications for the structure of Canadian agriculture. It also raises several policy questions for future research. Using data from 2005 Farm Financial Survey this paper examines the transfer of assets for both one and multi-generation farms. We have identified 73,900 farms where the oldest operator is 55 or older. Of these farmers 18,800 are operated by more than one generation of farmers. In the case of these farms the next generation is already involved in the farm business. The remaining 55,100 farms are operated by only one generation of farmers. The total assets based on market value for the one generation farms are estimated to be $47 Billion. The assets which are expected to be transferred to the next generation total$33.4 Billion. The majority of these farms are expected to be bought up by the multi-generation farms to achieve economies of scale or to be purchased by new entrants as lifestyle farms. In the case of multi-generation farms the total assets owned are estimated to be $40 Billion. The assets which are expected to be transferred to the next generation total$34.1 Billion. These farms are expected to stay within the family and be purchased by the next generation. They will continue to be operated by the next generation and in some instances on a larger scale.Farm Management,

Programproduktion som Kritisk Teori – eller tv-teksten som industriel iscenesættelse

Denne artikel peger på nødvendigheden af en revurdering af den tre-delte model, som Fiske og Gripsrud har fremført, ved at vise, hvorledes ‘sekundære’ og ‘tertiære’ tv-tekster uafladeligt bevæger sig eller rejser hen imod en ‘primær’ tekstuel status i det amerikan- ske multikanals-»flow«. En detaljeret gennemgang af industriens tekstuelle praksis – programbegivenheder, network-branding, ka- nallogoer, filmene bag filmen, pressemateriale på video, salgsma- teriale og tilgrænsende digitale medier – viser hvorledes industrien teoretiserer sine egne vilkår direkte på skærmen, og dermed også hvordan publikum vejledes igennem en sådan offentlig cirkulation af »inside«-viden om tv-systemet. Artiklen er oversat af Henrik Bødker

Reaching a stationary global population: what we have learnt, and what we must do

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The impact of the African AIDS epidemic

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Old and new factors in health transitions

The introductory section of the paper notes that the health transition literature suggests a greater range of cultural, social and behavioural influences on health, especially child survival, than has attracted the attention of most social science researchers. They concentrate disproportionately on the impact of parental education, especially maternal education, perhaps because these are measures that are easily quantified and readily available in census and surveys. The major part of the paper discusses the implications of the finding by Preston and Haines that there is little evidence that child survival in the United States a century ago was much affected by mother’s literacy, ethnicity or English-speaking ability. This review draws on that evidence to argue that Third World mortality has in contrast been reduced over recent decades by two imports: modern medical technology and the Western scientific attitude that induces a successful collaboration with the former. This attitude is largely a product of modern education and it is this symbiosis in reducing mortality between modern medical technology and the scientific outlook that explains why steep mortality declines in the contemporary Third World depend both upon providing an easily accessible modern health service (with a significant curative component) and the development of mass schooling (particularly for girls). It also explains the steep differentials in child survival by mother’s education