Urban Demographics: April 2012

Friday, April 27, 2012

Out for vacation!

Dear readers, I will be out of office for about five weeks with restricted access to emails. So I scheduled a few posts to run in the meantime. ok?

Soundtrack:

Guess where I am going?

Brazilian Census 2010: microdata! microdata!

The 2010 Brazilian Census microdata are now available. Thanks IBGE !

Start your engines!

Some interactive maps here.

Soundtrack: Roadhouse Blues

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Their favelas are better than ours!

This picture below of a particular neighborhood in San Francisco called my attention while I was reading this. It is much better than Rocinha, isn't it ?!

San Francisco

[Photo: Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle]

Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro's biggest favela

[Photo Credit: Eric Green]

related link: What favelas can teach us about America

Soundtrack: Seu Jorge

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

China's Demographic Future (Part 2)

[Image credit: Chinese American Aging Issues]

And here is an excellent paper to understand China's demographic future: "The Future of a Demographic Overachiever: Long-Term Implications of the Demographic Transition in China" published at PDR by Wang Feng. The paper also dicusses the role of the Chinese State in demographic transition. Prof Feng has also presented the paper at Stanford (the audio is available). If you are having difficulties access the paper, try this link.

I have selected a few sentences:

Mortality

"In the two decades after 1950, the crude death rate of the Chinese population was reduced by nearly 60 percent, from 18 per thousand in 1950 to 7.6 in 1970."

Life Expectancy

[in 50 years/ 1950-2000] China accomplished what it took these other countries [more developed european countries and US] a century to achieve, an increase in life expectancy from the 40s to over 70 years.

Fertility

"In contrast to western european countries, where it took 75 years or longer to complete a fertility transitionfrom a TFR of around 5 to the replacement level, in China a similar decline took only about two decades."

Demographic Transition

"In roughly half a century, China completed its transition from a low rate of natural increase due to high mortality and high fertility to a low rate of natural increase as a result of low mortality and low fertility."

Family

"Moreover, the large number of families with only one child, often against the will of the parents, presents serious economic and social risks for Chinese families and for society as a whole."

Labor Force and Aging

"China’s economic boom has relied on another crucial factor, namely a young and productive labor force. This large labor force, a non-repeatable historical product of the rapid demographic transition, was present fortuitously as the Chinese economy was about to take off."

"China’s rapidly shrinking young labor force, a result of very low fertility for nearly two decades, will soon end the era of abundant supply of inexpensive labor that enabled China to become the world’s largest manufacturing center in the last two decades."

My take: China is perhaps one of the few countries that have completed its fertility transition without completing its urban transition. It means that China still has large amount of rural-urban migration potential, which could keep an abundant supply of inexpensive labor for many decades. Perhaps this potential is being underestimated.

China's Demographic Future (Part 1)

An excellent article by The Economist on China’s Achilles heel. Here is Sarah Harper (Oxford) discussing this issue.

Saturday, April 21, 2012

52th Birthday

Nice Google's tribute to the 52th Birthday of Brasilia.

Photos by João Campello

Soundtrack: Eduardo e Monica

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Brazil Shapefiles

2020 post update: My team and I have created geobr, an R pacakge that is one of the easiest and fastest ways to download the shapefiles from all sorts of official spatial data sets of Brazil, including data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).

Download Shapefiles of Brazilian municipalities and census tracts. These files are made available by The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE)