Well as everyone who reads Afoe assiduously already knows this is my opininion: demography does matter. And now this is doubly official as some of us demography enthusiasts have just set up the demography matters weblog. This does not mean that you, gentle readers, will now be completely spared, but it does probably [...]

This is a kind of bits-and-bobs post without a lot of coherence, as I am trying to make sense of something which is hard to make sense of, so anyone with more specialist knowledge, please chip-in.
Now I think what we have here is a highly complex situation, and if individual actors behave strangely in a [...]

Bo Malmberg is a demographer and he works at the Stockholm-based Institute For Future Studies. Evo Morales is the ‘flamante’ President of Bolivia. OK, this much is clear, now where’s the connection?
Well, Brad Delong says of Morales’ election, citing Pyrrhus of Epirus, Another Such Victory and We Are Lost, while the Financial Times informs [...]

Back in July I published a post about Austrian demographer Wolfgang Lutz’s hypothesis that those countries which sustain total fertility rates below 1.5 for any length of time may have fallen into a self-reinforcing low-fertility trap. Old Rottenhat (Ray to his friends) argued in comments that I had explained the reasons for the existence [...]

This is definitely about to become the new ‘meme’ about China. Actually it is reasonably valid. China’s ‘demographic shocks’ which come principally from the great famine produced at the time of the cultural revolution, and then from the subsequent one-child policy, are undoubtedly going to have significant consequences. Today UK Tory front bench spokesman on [...]

In a post back in May about the bloody repression in Uzbekistan I noted that Crooked Timber’s John Quiggin was suggesting that US troops should be withdrawn immediately (I didn’t agree if you read the post). Well he seems to have got his way, and the reasoning behind the Uzbekistan parliament decision is of [...]

Confronting Demographic Change is the title of a two day conference currently being organised by Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities Commissioner Vladimir Spidla. The emphasis of the conference is on gender and family impact issues.
You can find a background briefing paper here.
This is also an interesting presentation.
Here’s a summary of the objectives. It’s very [...]

According to Oded Galor it has become evident that in the absence of a unified growth theory that is consistent with the entire process of development, the understanding of the contemporary growth process would be limited and distorted. He quote Copernicus to the effect that:
?It is as though an artist were to gather the hands, [...]

Really I realise I have been remiss in another important sense. I have long assumed that in fact the decision to reduce deficits was taken due to the coming fiscal pressure from ageing. This certainly was the background to the discussion. However now I look at the details of the SPG this area is not [...]

After so many days of posting topics related one way or another with death, perhaps it is better to get back to life. One good excuse for doing this could be the 25th International Population Conference organised by the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population and which opened yesterday in Tours, [...]