That proportion has continued to rise steadily, reaching 55% as of 2018. It's climbed faster in China, up from 48% to 59% — meaning an additional 180 million people are living in Chinese cities.
China now has 130 cities of at least 1 million people, more than the U.S. (45), European Union (36) and South America (46) combined.
The perception that China’s urbanisation is still in full swing is untrue for nearly one-third of Chinese cities, whose populations are shrinking, according to new findings by a Chinese university.A research team from Tsinghua University used satellite imagery to monitor the intensity of night lights in more than 3,300 cities and towns between 2013 and 2016. In 28 per cent of cases, the lights had dimmed.China now has 938 shrinking cities, according to Long Ying, an urban planning expert at China’s Tsinghua University, who founded and led the research group, Beijing City Lab. This is more than any other nation on Earth.The findings are indicative of declining populations and economic activity across almost one-third of the cities monitored, at a time when official economic data also shows that China is facing significant economic and demographic challenges.
The imperial dominance of the ancient Wari Empire at the Huaca Pucllana site in Lima, Peru, was likely not achieved through population replacement, according to a study published June 1, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Guido Valverde from the University of Adelaide, Australia, and colleagues.
Successive pre-Columbian civilizations existed in the central Andes of South America since the pre-ceramic period 5.5 kya, and ancient empires such as the Wari Empire (600 - 1100 AD) may have been important in shaping the region's demographic and cultural profiles. To investigate whether Wari dominance in the Peruvian Central Coast was based on population replacement or cultural diffusion, the authors of the present study sequenced the complete mitochondrial genomes of 34 individuals from the Huaca Pucllana archaeological site in Lima, Peru, who lived before, during, and after the Wari Empire, and assessed how the population's genetic diversity changed over time.
The researchers found that genetic diversity may only have changed subtly over this period, indicating population continuity over time with only minor genetic impact from Wari imperialism. The subtle genetic diversity shift found at this site may not be representative for the entire Wari territory, and more research is needed to characterize the overall influence of the Wari Empire. Nonetheless, the authors suggest that the Wari Empire may have exerted influence in this area through cultural diffusion rather than by replacement of the pre-existing population.
The view that the rich are highly mobile has gained much political traction in recent years and has become a central argument in debates about whether there should be "millionaire taxes" on top-income earners. But a new study dispels the common myth about the propensity of millionaires in the United States to move from high to low tax states.
"The most striking finding in our study is how little elites seem willing to move to exploit tax advantages across state lines," said Cristobal Young, an assistant professor of sociology at Stanford University and the lead author of the study. "Millionaire tax flight is occurring, but only at the margins of significance."
In any given year, Young and his fellow researchers found that roughly 500,000 individuals file tax returns reporting incomes of $1 million or more (constant 2005 dollars). From this population, only about 12,000 millionaires change their state each year. The annual millionaire migration rate is 2.4 percent, which is lower than the migration rate of the general population (2.9 percent). The highest rates of migration are seen among low-income tax filers: migration is 4.5 percent among people who earn around $10,000 a year.
"There is a widely held perception that elites are extremely mobile -- that they are more attached to money than to place, and with money you can live anywhere you want," said Young, who noted that millionaires are no less likely to live in states with high income taxes (e.g., New Jersey or California) than in states with low or zero income taxes (e.g., Texas or Florida). "We tend to think of migration as a form of freedom and one of the privileges enjoyed by the rich. In practice, migration comes with high social and economic costs -- uprooting one's family, breaking away from one's social networks, and restarting in a new place."
Japan's latest census confirmed the hard reality long ago signaled by shuttered shops and abandoned villages across the country: the population is shrinking.
Japan's population stood at 127.1 million last fall, down 0.7 percent from 128.1 million in 2010, according to results of the 2015 census, released Friday. The 947,000 decline in the population in the last five years was the first since the once-every-five-years count started in 1920.
Unable to count on a growing market and labor force to power economic expansion, the government has drawn up urgent measures to counter the falling birth rate.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has made preventing a decline below 100 million a top priority. But population experts say it would be virtually impossible to prevent that even if the birth rate rose to Abe's target of 1.8 children per woman from the current birthrate of 1.4.
Without a substantial increase in the birthrate or loosening of staunch Japanese resistance to immigration, the population is forecast to fall to about 108 million by 2050 and to 87 million by 2060.
Pleistocene Mitochondrial Genomes Suggest a Single Major Dispersal of Non-Africans and a Late Glacial Population Turnover in Europe
Authors:
Posth et al
Abstract:
How modern humans dispersed into Eurasia and Australasia, including the number of separate expansions and their timings, is highly debated [ 1, 2 ]. Two categories of models are proposed for the dispersal of non-Africans: (1) single dispersal, i.e., a single major diffusion of modern humans across Eurasia and Australasia [ 3–5 ]; and (2) multiple dispersal, i.e., additional earlier population expansions that may have contributed to the genetic diversity of some present-day humans outside of Africa [ 6–9 ]. Many variants of these models focus largely on Asia and Australasia, neglecting human dispersal into Europe, thus explaining only a subset of the entire colonization process outside of Africa [ 3–5, 8, 9 ]. The genetic diversity of the first modern humans who spread into Europe during the Late Pleistocene and the impact of subsequent climatic events on their demography are largely unknown. Here we analyze 55 complete human mitochondrial genomes (mtDNAs) of hunter-gatherers spanning ∼35,000 years of European prehistory. We unexpectedly find mtDNA lineage M in individuals prior to the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). This lineage is absent in contemporary Europeans, although it is found at high frequency in modern Asians, Australasians, and Native Americans. Dating the most recent common ancestor of each of the modern non-African mtDNA clades reveals their single, late, and rapid dispersal less than 55,000 years ago. Demographic modeling not only indicates an LGM genetic bottleneck, but also provides surprising evidence of a major population turnover in Europe around 14,500 years ago during the Late Glacial, a period of climatic instability at the end of the Pleistocene.
Past population dynamics in Northwest Patagonia: An estimation using molecular and radiocarbon data
Authors:
Ivan Perez et al
Abstract:
Studying demographic changes in past human populations is of great interest due to their role in processes of cultural change as well as the biological evolution of populations. Despite this, a general consensus about the most adequate methodological approach to this end is still lacking. Here, a new approach that combines radiocarbon frequency distributions —uncorrected and corrected by taphonomic bias— and demographic curves independently estimated with modern mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is used to estimate population size changes in Northwest Patagonia since the Pleistocene–Holocene transition to recent times. Results based on mtDNA sequences suggest a census size of approximately 3000 individuals (with an estimated female effective size of ca. 750 individuals) by the initial peopling of this region around 10,000 years ago. A strong correspondence between curves based on mtDNA data and those based on archaeological radiocarbon dates (n = 251) was obtained after the effect of taphonomic bias was accounted for. The demographic curves indicate that the population size was relatively stable during the earlier Early Holocene and it increased between 7000 and 5000 years ago, reaching a maximum size around 1000 years ago. Then, the population size declined until present time. We conclude that demographic inferences made on the basis of radiocarbon dates are not necessarily biased but this needs to be evaluated with independent evidence in each specific geographical region.
I have been wanting for some time to do an extended analysis of the ongoing Ukrainian situation. For the time being, here's four articles which suggest interesting future trends for migration from Ukraine, since the end of the Soviet Union one of the largest sources of migrants in the world.
China's ruling Communist Party announced Thursday that the country will start allowing all married couples to have two children, abolishing an unpopular policy that has limited many urban families to only one child for more than three decades.
The age at first birth in Malawi has remained constant from 1992 to 2010, despite expanded access to education for girls. Social demographer Monica Grant explores this finding in a new Population Development and Review paper, noting that it does not imply that women would have been better off in the absence of recent education policies.
Dr. Grant notes that young women in Malawi will hopefully be able to translate their expanded educational opportunities into improved health and well-being for their children, even without a rise in the age at first birth.
Human population dynamics in Europe over the Last Glacial Maximum
Authors:
Tallavaara et al
Abstract:
The severe cooling and the expansion of the ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), 27,000–19,000 y ago (27–19 ky ago) had a major impact on plant and animal populations, including humans. Changes in human population size and range have affected our genetic evolution, and recent modeling efforts have reaffirmed the importance of population dynamics in cultural and linguistic evolution, as well. However, in the absence of historical records, estimating past population levels has remained difficult. Here we show that it is possible to model spatially explicit human population dynamics from the pre-LGM at 30 ky ago through the LGM to the Late Glacial in Europe by using climate envelope modeling tools and modern ethnographic datasets to construct a population calibration model. The simulated range and size of the human population correspond significantly with spatiotemporal patterns in the archaeological data, suggesting that climate was a major driver of population dynamics 30–13 ky ago. The simulated population size declined from about 330,000 people at 30 ky ago to a minimum of 130,000 people at 23 ky ago. The Late Glacial population growth was fastest during Greenland interstadial 1, and by 13 ky ago, there were almost 410,000 people in Europe. Even during the coldest part of the LGM, the climatically suitable area for human habitation remained unfragmented and covered 36% of Europe.
Rusty padlocks seal empty classrooms and blank graduation certificates litter a dusty, silent school corridor in Rudong, a haunting glimpse of China's ageing future in a town which pioneered the one-child policy.
Education facilities are being shrunk to cater for dwindling pupil numbers, and the once bustling Technical Secondary School is now a hollow eight-storey shell.
Long before China's Communist rulers rolled out the one-child policy nationwide to halt population growth, Rudong was already carrying out forced sterilisations, abortions and highly personal checks on women on its own initiative.
It was praised by the authorities for its strict enforcement of the rules that became the cornerstone of Beijing's social management.
Now China is facing the consequences of a dwindling workforce and a rapidly ageing population, and Beijing has been loosening the rules to encourage more births.
Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a population distribution model that provides unprecedented county-level predictions of where people will live in the U.S. in the coming decades.
Initially developed to assist in the siting of new energy infrastructure, the team's model has a broad range of implications from urban planning to climate change adaptation. The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"We do a census every 10 years because those data help us do long-term socioeconomic planning," said Budhendra Bhaduri, who leads ORNL's Geographic Information Science and Technology group. "Population projection numbers are important, but many pressing societal needs also require an understanding of where people are going to be. This has always been a challenge; we've never had a good method to make future projections spatially explicit."
The new model builds on years of research in the development of two other ORNL technologies that supply geographical distribution of population: LandScan Global provides one-kilometer resolution for the world and LandScan USA provides 90-meter resolution for the U.S. Incorporating regional variables such as land cover, slope, distances to larger cities, roads and population movement allowed the researchers to refine future population distributions by county.
"We took the U.S. national population total and downscaled to the county level to examine how local population growths vary geographically," said ORNL's Jacob McKee, the study's lead author.
In the study's projections for 2030 and 2050, the researchers set constraints for each contiguous U.S. county under a business-as-usual scenario based on historical conditions. The team's analysis of this scenario found that sprawl growth was projected to be most prevalent in the following counties: El Dorado, CA, Maricopa, AZ, and Riverside, CA.
Upper Palaeolithic population histories of Southwestern France: A comparison of the demographic signatures of 14C date distributions and archaeological site counts
Authors:
French et al
Abstract:
Radiocarbon date frequency distributions and archaeological site counts are two popular proxies used to investigate prehistoric demography, following the assumption that variations in these data reflect fluctuations in the relative size and distribution of past populations. However, the two approaches are rarely applied to the same data-set and their applicability is heavily conditioned by the archaeological record in question, particularly research histories, agendas, and funding availability. In this paper we use both types of data to examine the population history of the Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers (∼40 000–12 000 cal BP) of Southwestern France, comparing the demographic signatures generated.
Both proxies produce similar signatures across the Upper Palaeolithic sequence of the region, strengthening the interpretation of relative demographic changes as the cause of the pattern. In particular, a marked population decline is seen in both datasets during the Late Gravettian (∼28 000 cal BP), as well as a population increase in the Late Solutrean (∼25 000 cal BP) supporting the notion that the region acted as a population refugium during the Last Glacial Maximum. Where the two proxies diverge in the demographic signatures they produce, the radiocarbon date distribution shows peaks compared to troughs in site counts; the opposite pattern expected given taphonomic issues surrounding cultural carbon. Despite differences in chronological resolution and sampling bias, our data suggest that the two proxies can be considered broadly equivalent; a finding which warrants the investigation of prehistoric demography in regions where either extensive survey data or radiometric dating programmes are unavailable. While some preliminary observations are made, the impact of changing mobility on diachronic patterns seen in both proxies remains, however, difficult to assess.
Inference of Gorilla demographic and selective history from whole genome sequence data
Authors:
McMannus et al
Abstract:
While population-level genomic sequence data have been gathered extensively for humans, similar data from our closest living relatives are just beginning to emerge. Examination of genomic variation within great apes offers many opportunities to increase our understanding of the forces that have differentially shaped the evolutionary history of hominid taxa. Here, we expand upon the work of the Great Ape Genome Project by analyzing medium to high coverage whole genome sequences from 14 western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla), 2 eastern lowland gorillas (Gorilla beringei graueri), and a single Cross River individual (Gorilla gorilla diehli). We infer that the ancestors of western and eastern lowland gorillas diverged from a common ancestor ~261 thousand years ago (kya), and that the ancestors of the Cross River population diverged from the western lowland gorilla lineage ~68 kya. Using a diffusion approximation approach to model the genome-wide site frequency spectrum, we infer a history of western lowland gorillas that includes an ancestral population expansion of ~1.4-fold around ~970 kya and a recent ~5.6-fold contraction in population size ~23 kya. The latter may correspond to a major reduction in African equatorial forests around the Last Glacial Maximum. We also analyze patterns of variation among western lowland gorillas to identify several genomic regions with strong signatures of recent selective sweeps. We find that processes related to taste, pancreatic and saliva secretion, sodium ion transmembrane transport, and cardiac muscle function are overrepresented in genomic regions predicted to have experienced recent positive selection.
On Nov. 20, the Japanese Ministry of Defense confirmed that military recruitment figures for the 2014 fiscal year had declined compared to the previous year. The number of applicants on the non-commissioned officer fast-track fell 10 percent. The number of aviation school applicants fell five percent.
Mainichi Shimbun was the only Japanese news agency to report the fall in applications. Its story spread around the Chinese press via South China Morning Press.
While the figures are probably correct, Mainichi’s article betrays its political bias. The paper assumes, without much evidence, that the decline is a result of the government’s recent—and controversial—decision to give Japan the legal right to go to war to defend its allies.
“The Defense Ministry started soliciting applications after the government made a cabinet decision on July 1 to allow Japan to exercise the right to collective self-defense,” Mainichi asserts.
The Defense Ministry denied there was any link between the fall in prospective servicemembers and the constitutional reinterpretation, according to the paper.
Mainichi Shimbun opposes collective self-defense. The article pushes that stance at the expense of the broader context. Namely, a declining birthrate, low unemployment and a ministry desperately competing for young workers.
In other words, there’s a better explanation for Japan’s military recruitment problem than some popular revolt against the government’s new war policy.
China’s rise over the past 30 years has been nothing short of spectacular.
After decades of double-digit growth, today China is the world’s second largest economy—and possesses an increasingly sophisticated military that’s among the planet’s most powerful. Despite China bordering a number of unstable countries, its borders are secure.
That wasn’t always the case. In 2,000 years, China has suffered invasions, revolutions and humiliations from the outside world—plus its own internal rebellions. It has been brutalized, conquered and colonized.
No longer. China’s defense spending has increased tenfold in 25 years. Beijing is building a powerful blue-water navy, developing stealth fighters and carefully experimenting with peacekeeping and expeditionary operations.
China’s military buildup, along with an aggressive foreign policy, has inspired a fair amount of alarm in the West. Some American policymakers consider Beijing to be Washington’s only “near-peer competitor”—in other words, the only country with the military might to actually beat the U.S. military in certain circumstances.
But they’re wrong. Even after decades of expensive rearmament, China is a paper dragon—a version of what Mao Zedong wrongly claimed the United States was … in 1956.
Female populations have been larger than male populations throughout human history, according to research published today in the open access journal Investigative Genetics. The research used a new technique to obtain higher quality paternal genetic information to analyse the demographic history of males and females in worldwide populations.
The study compared the paternally-inherited Y chromosome (NRY) with maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of 623 males from 51 populations. The analysis showed that female populations were larger before the out-of-Africa migration and remained so throughout almost all subsequent migrations. The main drivers of this trend are likely to be processes such as polygyny, where one male mates with many females, and the fact that in most societies, women tend to move to live with their husbands. This has resulted in females making a greater genetic contribution to the global population than males.
By now it should be clear that the monetary experiment currently being carried out in Japan (known as “Abenomics”) is fundamentally different from the kind of quantitative easing which was implemented in the United States and the United Kingdom during the global financial crisis. In the US and the UK QE was implemented in order to stabilize the financial system, while in Japan, and now the Euro Area (EA) the objective is to end deflationary pressures and reflate economies which are arguably caught in some form of liquidity trap.
In particular it is hard not to draw the conclusion that something structural and more long-term is taking place in Japan, and that that something is only tangentially related to the recent global financial crisis. One plausible explanation is that Japan’s long-lasting malaise is not simply a debt deflationary hangover from the bursting of a property bubble in 1992 but rather with the rapid population ageing the country has experienced. If this is the case then the ongoing economic stagnation in Europe may have a lot more to do with the Japan experience than it does with the recent economic dynamics seen in the UK and the US. The reason for this is simple: Europe’s population is the second oldest on the planet after Japan’s. Certainly at first sight the similarity is striking, especially when it comes to working age population dynamics.
