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Demographic Pressure (demographic + pressure)
Selected AbstractsStruggling to Save Cash: Seasonal Migration and Vulnerability in West Bengal, IndiaDEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 4 2003Ben Rogaly This article concerns an important but overlooked means by which able-bodied poor people get hold of lump sums of cash in rural West Bengal: seasonal migration for agricultural wage work. Drawing on a regional study of four migration streams, our main focus here is on the struggle to secure this cash by landless households in just one of those streams, originating in Murshidabad District. Case studies are used to illustrate the importance for women in nuclear families of maintaining supportive networks of kin for periods when men are absent. A parallel analysis is made of the negotiations between male migrant workers and their employers, at labour markets, during the period of work, and afterwards. The article then briefly discusses some of the contrasting ways in which remittances are used by landless households and owners of very small plots of land, in the context of rapid ecological change, demographic pressure and growing inequality. [source] Proto-Uto-Aztecan: A Community of Cultivators in Central Mexico?AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 4 2001Jane H. Hill Authorities on the origin and history of Uto-Aztecan have held that speakers of the protolanguage were foragers who lived in upland regions of Arizona, New Mexico, and the adjacent areas of the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua about 5,000 years ago. New lexical evidence supports a different view, that speakers of the protolanguage were maize cultivators. The Proto-Uto-Aztecan speech community was probably located in Mesoamerica and spread northward into the present range because of demographic pressure associated with cultivation. The chronology for the spread and differentiation of the family should then correspond to the chronology for the northward spread of maize cultivation from Mesoamerica into the U.S. Southwest, between 4500 and 3000 B.P. [Uto-Aztecan, cultivation, Mesoamerican, historical linguistics, migration] [source] Children's Economic Roles in the Maya Family Life Cycle: Cain, Caldwell, and Chayanov RevisitedPOPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT REVIEW, Issue 3 2002Ronald D. Lee This article examines the relationship between household demographic pressure and interage transfers for a group of Maya subsistence agriculturists in Yucatán, Mexico. The authors use data from a field study conducted in 1992,93 on individual time allocation, relative productivity by age and sex, and caloric costs of activities to estimate age schedules of average consumption and production. Using these, they investigate the net costs of children to their parents and find that children have a negative net asset value up to the time they leave home. The direction of net wealth flows in this group is downward, from older to younger, and in economic terms the internal rate of return to children is highly negative up to the time they leave home. Nonetheless, children play a critically important role in the family's economic life cycle. On average, girls offset 76 percent of their consumption costs before leaving home at age 19, and boys offset 82 percent before leaving home at 22. Without the contributions from children as a group, parents would have to double or triple their work effort during part of the family life cycle if they were to raise the same number of children. By the thirteenth year of the family life cycle, children as a group produce more than half of what they consume in every year, and after the twentieth year children produce more than 80 percent of what they as a group consume. The authors also find that the elderly in the sample, ages 50 to 65, produce more than they consume. Thus while children have a negative net asset value to parents, the timing of their children's economic contribution across the family life cycle plays a key role in underwriting the cost of large families. [source] The failure of pronatalism in developed states ,with cultural,ethnic hegemony': the Israeli lessonPOPULATION, SPACE AND PLACE (PREVIOUSLY:-INT JOURNAL OF POPULATION GEOGRAPHY), Issue 2 2008O. Winckler Abstract During the past two decades, the ,hot' demographic issue in the developed states ,with cultural,ethnic hegemony' changed radically , from a focus on ,global demographic pressure', namely, the ,Malthusian syndrome' of rapid population growth in the developing countries, to the ethno-religious composition of their own populations. The solution adopted by many of these countries to tackle the twin demographic challenges of population ageing and the changing dependency ratio was the implementation of pronatalist policies which aimed at reducing their dependence upon labour immigration. This article examines the efficiency of these pronatalist policies through the Israeli case. The core questions of the article are: Has the Israeli pronatalist policy achieved its basic aims? What influence did the Israeli natalist policy and the child allowance structure have on the fertility patterns of the Israeli-Arabs? What can be learned from the Israeli experience regarding the efficiency of these pronatalist policies in developed states? The major lesson from the Israeli experience is that, to a large extent, these pronatalist polices failed. The fertility rate of the Jewish middle class, the Christian-Arabs and the Druze steadily declined, while that of the Israeli-Muslims, although lower since the 1960s, is still twice that of the Jewish middle class. One can find a similar situation in all of the developed states ,with cultural,ethnic hegemony.' Thus, the inescapable conclusion is that in democratic-developed societies, in which women enjoy equity in every respect, fertility rates will eventually decline to below replacement-level regardless of pronatalist financial benefits. Consequently, the process of the developed states ,with cultural,ethnic hegemony' becoming developed states ,without cultural,ethnic hegemony' is irreversible due to the constant need for massive labour immigration. In the case of Israel, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, there are high fertility rates in only two communities , the Ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Muslims , paradoxically the two ,non-Zionist' communities. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] | ||||||||||