Many industrialized countries are facing large problems with their public pension systems in the 21st century. An unfavourable age distribution, with lower population shares in working ages and increasing shares and numbers of elderly persons in the future will lead, under current pension systems, to a drop in contributions and at the same time to sharply rising amounts of benefits paid.
This book analyzes the impact of dynamics in age structure and marital status composition on future public pension expenditures in twelve industrialized countries. It shows that there is no demographic...

EDITORS Hans V AN DEN BREKEL * and Fred DEVEN** * NIDI, P. O. Box 11650, 2502 AR The Hague, The Netherlands ** CBGS, Markiesstraat 1, 1000 Brussels, Belgium The series "Population and Family in the Low Countries" (POPFAM), established in 1976, aims to introduce selected issues of demographic research in Flanders/Belgium and the Netherlands to an international audience. The publication series results from cooperation between the Nether lands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI, The Hague) and the Flemish Population and Family Study Centre (CBGS, Brussels). This 1995 edition is the...

European Populations: Unity in Diversity was the general theme of the 1999 European Population Conference, which convened in The Hague (The Netherlands) from 30 August to 3 September on behalf of the European Association for Population Studies (EAPS), The International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, (IUSSP), The Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI), Statistics Netherlands (SN), and The Netherlands Demographic Society (NVD).
On the threshold of the third millennium, Europe is facing major and challenging demographic issues that, to a large...

The aim of Diversity in Family Formation is to examine changes in the start of the family formation process. Rather than giving a rough overview of demographic changes in many countries, a comparison of differences in changes in family formation and fertility behaviour between Belgium and The Netherlands is interesting for various reasons.
First, even though the economic and cultural differences between these countries are relatively small there is one important difference: Belgium is predominantly Catholic, whereas The Netherlands has about equal proportions of Catholics and...

The diversification in family practices constitutes a major theme of research in the field of population studies. A substantial part of these diversification processes are linked to the stage of family formation. The increase in non-marital cohabitation and non-marital fertility and the postponement of marriage and parenthood have particularly characterised the transition from youth to adulthood among the post-war cohorts. In studying the transition from youth to adulthood, the timing of events is crucial. Different timing patterns are the product of the interplay between a multitude of...

PUMIAO 1. The Subject Matter: Urban Public Places 2. The Location: Asia Pacific Region 3. The Purpose of the'"Book: For the Makers of Public Places 4. The Three Perspectives of the Book: Description, Criticism, and Intervention 5. Perspective One: Characteristics of Asia Pacific Cities and Their Public Places (1) High Population Density (2) Large Cities (3) Mixed Uses (4) Government-Centered and Pro-Development Culture (5) The East-versus-West Bipolarity (6) Small Amount of Public Space (7) Absence of Large Nodes and Overall Structure in Public Space (8) Intensive Use of Public Space (9)...

Guillaume Wunsch, Michel Mouchart, Josianne Duchene This book is an outcome of the activities of the Working Group on Health, Morbidity, and Mortality Differentials of the European Association for Population Studies, which was chaired for some years by one of the present editors (G. Wunsch). In collaboration with the Institute of Statistics and the Institute of Demography of the University of Louvain, this Working Group held a workshop in Louvain-Ia-Neuve a few years ago on the use of life tables in Europe, taking into account problems of data collection, methods, and models. Some of the...

Marriage and social inequality are closely interrelated. Marriage is dependent on the structure of marriage markets, and marriage patterns have consequences for social inequality. This book demonstrates that in most modern societies the educa tional system has become an increasingly important marriage market, particularly for those who are highly qualified. Educational expansion in general and the rising educational participation of women in particular unintentionally have increased the rate of "assortative meeting" and assortative mating across birth cohorts. Rising educational homogamy...

Marriage and social inequality are closely interrelated. Marriage is dependent on the structure of marriage markets, and marriage patterns have consequences for social inequality. This book demonstrates that in most modern societies the educa tional system has become an increasingly important marriage market, particularly for those who are highly qualified. Educational expansion in general and the rising educational participation of women in particular unintentionally have increased the rate of "assortative meeting" and assortative mating across birth cohorts. Rising educational homogamy...

Low fertility, one of the critical issues in the contemporary world, will persist in the foreseeable future. That is arguably the principal conclusion of this book. Fundamental changes in social security and health care systems, taxation schemes, and migration policies, for instance, are inevitable, unless societies are able to institute effective measures and create favorable conditions for increasing fertility. Such are the unavoidable challenges facing European and other economically advanced countries.

The present study applies the cohort analysis approach to detailed data...