'We are faced everywhere with a growing population': demographic change and the British state, 1955-64

The early 1960s was a period of relative expansion for the welfare state, and the return to the use of planning techniques in macroeconomic policy. This has hitherto been explained by reference to a number of general causes. These have included party political electoral necessity, the need to gain popular support for the cold war by spreading the benefits of liberal capitalism, the power of welfare professionals, the growing realization that the post-war welfare state was not working as well as previously thought, and generational changes in politics and the civil service. Whilst not denying the importance of all these factors, this essay seeks to make clear the importance of another vital element in this story: the implications for the welfare state and the managed economy of the rise in the birth rate, and the perceived' population explosion', of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Statistical estimates are presented here that show just how large the implied expansion of the welfare state, and just how serious the pressure of a growing dependent population, would have been had the population predictions of the early 1930s proved to be accurate.     

Restructuring in the Canadian Newsprint Industry

This special issue of the Canadian Geographer presents five articles examining the wave of restructuring and the associated changes in the labour process that have swept through Canada's pulp and paper industry in recent years. The allocation of an entire issue to this topic is, we believe, justified by the importance of the industry to the Canadian economy, by the dramatic restructuring that has occurred to it since the early 1980s, and by the centrality of geography to an understanding of these events. During the period covered by these articles, there have been major changes in the location of pulp and paper operations, in their inputs to production, in the organization and technology of production within the mills, in the relations between production units, in the nature of work and employment, in the products produced, and in the markets served.     

On the Use and Limitations of Trend Surface Models

A lthough the technique of trend surface mapping has been developed in the main by geologists and geophysicists, its use has now diffused into a number of other fields including regional science, botany, meteorology, and geography. It would be wrong to be unduly critical of the pioneer applications of any technique, even where errors have been made, for there are few guidelines to help such explorers. On the other hand it is felt that trend surface methods are sufficiently well estab-lishd in geography for there to be a need for a more critical appraisal of the method, especially in view of some careless or even erroneous applications that have been made recently by geographers. This paper will highlight what are considered to be some of the more important limitations of trend surface models, and will point to one or two specifically geographical problems.