Sectarian demography,territoriality and political development in Northern Ireland

"Here we discuss, firstly, the limits of Census-based empiricism [in Northern Ireland] and the usually unacknowledged problems of data and interpretation which have resulted in a seriously misleading ?conventional wisdom'. Secondly, we question its sectarian terms of reference, the over-identification of religion and politics, and misconceptions of ethnicity.... Thirdly, we focus on some of the flawed policy ?solutions' associated with empiricism and sectarianism, including ?internal' power-sharing and ?consociational' strategies for political development."     

Urban housing demography

"The purpose of this article is to review the literature in housing demography with emphasis on its geographic aspects." The differences among developed countries concerning patterns of home ownership are noted. "After a short discussion of households as the point of articulation between population and housing, I will examine interurban differentials in housing demography, review various population-oriented and housing-oriented approaches to intraurban housing demography, and finally, discuss the problems of and challenges for geographic research in this field."     

Political economy,demography and development in Australia's Northern Territory

The Canadian ‘staples thesis’ literature has documented both the risks (in the tradition of Harold Innis) and the opportunities (in the tradition of W. A. Macintosh) inherent in economies that are dependent on the export of minimally processed natural resources. The key risk is that of retarded long‐term growth as a result of a lack of diversification and over‐dependence on foreign capital and markets. This article argues that the demographic consequences of staples approaches to development also make it difficult to achieve diversification. It profiles Australia's Northern Territory as an example of a mining‐dependent (fiscal) economy that demonstrates a particular demographic profile consistent with what might be expected of a resource frontier. The article argues, however, that restrictive demographic characteristics persist (high sex ratios, high population mobility, disadvantaged position of indigenous people and remote dwellers) even though mining has become an insignificant direct employer (less than one percent of the workforce) and the services sector drives the labour market. This persistence can be linked to the Territory and federal government expectations of economic development patterns in the region and the frontier mythology created around the Northern Territory. Addressing the demographic imbalance is a critical step towards realizing ambitions for economic diversification.     

Process, perception, and practice: Time perspectivism in Yosemite native demography

Multiple concepts of time apply to archaeology—from analytical time used to organize and interpret the archaeological record to the time of lived experience of those individuals responsible for creation of the archaeological record. This paper demonstrates how these disparate concepts of time can be reconciled through a perception-based approach to time perspectivism, which invokes multiple analytical scales working from the minimum scale of the average human lifespan. This approach is demonstrated through a case study of hunter–gatherer demographic change in Yosemite Valley in the central Sierra Nevada of California.     

Producing citizens, reproducing the "French race": immigration, demography, and pronatalism in early twentieth-century France

This essay examines how, in the context of depopulation and mass immigration, members of the French pronatalist movement advanced a policy favouring immigrants from Italy, Spain, and Poland. Because the 'demographic crisis' created a shortage of citizens as well as workers, pronatalists held that foreign workers must also be assimilable, and able to produce French offspring. While the racial difference of colonial subjects was deemed immutable, pronatalists called for the immigration of white foreigners whose less 'modern' condition promoted fecundity, traditionalism, and gender dimorphism. Evidence is drawn from demographic studies, the press of France's largest pronatalist movement, and a pronatalist advisory committee created by the Ministry of Health in 1920.     

Linked population and economic models: some methodological issues in forecasting,analysis, and policy optimization

Some problems associated with demographic-economic forecasting include finding models appropriate for a declining economy with unemployment, using a multiregional approach in an interregional model, finding a way to show differential consumption while endogenizing unemployment, and avoiding unemployment inconsistencies. The solution to these problems involves the construction of an activity-commodity framework, locating it within a group of forecasting models, and indicating possible ratios towards dynamization of the framework. The authors demonstrate the range of impact multipliers that can be derived from the framework and show how these multipliers relate to Leontief input-output multipliers. It is shown that desired population distribution may be obtained by selecting instruments from the economic sphere to produce, through the constraints vector of an activity-commodity framework, targets selected from demographic activities. The next step in this process, empirical exploitation, was carried out by the authors in the United Kingdom, linking an input-output model with a wide selection of demographic and demographic-economic variables. The generally tenuous control which government has over any variables in systems of this type, especially in market economies, makes application in the policy field of the optimization approach a partly conjectural exercise, although the analytic capacity of the approach can provide clear indications of policy directions.     

Prehistoric demography of North America inferred from radiocarbon data

Large radiocarbon datasets are increasingly used as a paleodemographic proxy, although potential sources of bias in such records are poorly understood. In this paper, we use more than 25,000 radiocarbon dates extracted from the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database (CARD) to estimate long-term population trends in North America, while critically examining biases in such records. The frequency distribution of CARD dates shows a positive curvilinear pattern, such that older dates exist in lower numbers than more recent dates, which in part reflects the removal of cultural carbon from the archaeological record through processes such as erosion and dissolution. The average annual growth rate of radiocarbon dates in CARD was calculated and used to derive estimates of the population of North America from the Paleo-Indian to the Contact Periods. While taphonomic bias has likely affected the CARD data, other factors, such as the overrepresentation of Paleo-Indian and Archaic radiocarbon dates, may have offset any bias due to taphonomy. A quantitative reconstruction of Native American population shows that population increased rapidly around 2000 cal yr BP, reaching a maximum of 2,500,000 people by ～AD 1150. From this time until European contact, the population declined, possibly due to the effects of increased sedentism and population density.