Population ageing is projected to affect all countries across the world in coming decades. The current rate of population ageing is unprecedented in human history with population projections indicating that this will be an enduring trend. Moreover, population ageing is spatially pervasive, affecting every man, woman and child. This has considerable implications for policy responding to the economic, social and healthcare outcomes of population ageing. The potential economic implications ha...

For most of the vast span of human history, economic growth was all but nonexistent. Then, about two centuries ago, some nations began to emerge from this epoch of economic stagnation, experiencing sustained economic growth that led to significant increases in standards of living and profoundly altered the level and distribution of wealth, population, education, and health across the globe. The question ever since has been--why?This is the first book to put forward a unified theory...

In a world of increasingly mixed identities, what does it mean to belong? As western democracies increasingly curtail their support for multiculturalism, how can migrants establish belonging as citizens? A Muslim Diaspora in Australia explores how a particular migrant group has faced the challenges of belonging. The author illustrates how Bosnian migrants in Australia have sought to find places for themselves as migrants, as refugees, and as Muslims, in Australia and Australian society. Ch...

Education has significant and far-reaching effects not only on individuals, but also on the societies in which they live and to which they contribute. The education level of a population affects how a country supports itself and others and the degree to which it can participate in the global field. While everyone from politicians to policymakers to celebrities has stressed the importance of education, there has not been-until now-a vigorous yet comprehensible examination of data to support...

This book explores the diverse immigrant experiences in urban West Africa, where some groups integrate seamlessly while others face exclusion and violence. It shows, counterintuitively, that cultural similarities between immigrants and their hosts do not help immigrant integration and may, in fact, disrupt it. This book is one of the first to describe and explain in a systematic way immigrant integration in the developing world, where half of all international migrants go. It relies on int...

This book provides a comprehensive, theory-based analysis of current issues in population economics. It addresses the most important problems caused by demographic changes using the popular overlapping generations growth model by Samuelson and Diamond. Taking into account families’ fertility decisions, it examines not only the demographic changes due to longer life expectancy but also the effects of social security policy on demography and labor supply/individual retirement behaviors. Cond...

Prolific literature, both popular and scholarly, depicts America in the period of the High Cold War as being obsessed with normality, implicitly figuring the postwar period as a return to the way of life that had been put on hold, first by the Great Depression and then by Pearl Harbor.Demographic Angst argues that mandated normativity—as a political agenda and a social ethic—precluded explicit expression of the anxiety produced by America’s radically reconfigured postwar population...

The essays in this book not only examine the variety of atheist expression and experience in the Western context, they also explore how local, national and international settings may contribute to the shaping of atheist identities. By addressing identity at these different levels, the book explores how individuals construct their own atheist—or non-religious—identity, how they construct community and how identity factors into atheist interaction at the social or institutional levels. The b...

Tianjian Shi shows how cultural norms affect political attitudes and behavior through two causal pathways, one at the individual level and one at the community level. Focusing on two key norms - definition of self-interest and orientation to authority - he tests the theory with multiple surveys conducted in mainland China and Taiwan. Shi employs multi-level statistical analysis to show how, in these two very different political systems, similar norms exert similar kinds of influence on pol...

This text brings together studies in various aspects of the theory of the capitalist economy. It focuses on major themes of the Marxist tradition that postulate the existence and importance of social relations and structures underlying the esoteric realm of economic categories: prices, profits, wages, etc. The author takes a reappraising, critical look at the concepts of the deep structure - value, explitation, immanent crisis - using the analytical tools of modern economics to improve tho...

This volume illuminates changes in Israeli society over the past generation. Goldscheider identifies three key social changes that have led to the transformation of Israeli society in the twenty-first century: the massive immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union, the economic shift to a high-tech economy, and the growth of socioeconomic inequalities inside Israel. To deepen his analysis of these developments, Goldscheider focuses on ethnicity, religion, and gender, including the gr...

Regional mortality differences are one dimension of health inequalities, but its trends and determinants in Germany are widely unknown. This book examines and illustrates patterns of regional mortality in Germany—with focus on small-area differentials—and their changes over time. It identifies explanatory factors at individual and regional level. Mortality differences between eastern and western Germany exist, but small-area mortality differentials are often greater. Though the main spatia...