Out for vacation & Biographical note

Dear readers, I will be out of office for about two weeks (for “honeymoon reasons”). So I scheduled a few posts to run in the meantime.

ps. I definitely do not intend to check my emails.

Why so few? Brazilian emigration

(Read below for further details)

I've read in the last few weeks an interesting tentative debate on "Why do Brazilians emigrate so infrequently?". The question was posed by Tyler Cowen and Leonardo Moansterio, who started this 'conversatition'. Over a hundred comments later, the main hypothesis summarized by Leo are:

• Many poor Brazilians cannot emigrate to developed countries because they are just too far away. Yes, distance and cost still play important roles as limiting factors.
  
  
• The Brazilian middle class usually doesn't speak english or have family/friend network abroad (This would be mainly because Brazil has been a closed economy for a long period of time)
  
  
• The relatively few high-educated Brazilians would have no strong reasons to emigrate permanently since they enjoy pretty good living standards.

Sounds plausible, right? now...., don't these tentative explanations sound familiar? Ravenstein (1885) and Everett S. Lee (1966) would probably say: "yessssss!"

By the way, the image above presents the international migration maps created by James Cheshire using R(!) and this database (I thank Jonathan Crowe for his post).

Assorted Links on Social Networks

• Facebook v. Twitter Demographics
  
  
• (update!) The placebook - worldwide Facebook user distribution mapped (via mpdt)
  
  
• Anatomy of twitter usage in the US
  
  
• Twitter's Most-Influential People: Brazilian Comedian #1
  
  
• Mapping all Tweets for a specific Keyword
  
  
  
  


• Twitter Data - Seeking Spatial Pattern (by Fabian Neuhaus)
  
  
• Tweetography of the cities around the world (by DigitalUrban and Steven Gray
  
  
• Mapping a Day in the Life of Twitter (by Chris McDowal via Floatingsheep)

Mapping a Day in the Life of Twitter from Chris McDowall on Vimeo.

"Brazil's Brain Strain"

this is a self-promotion post Our study on Skilled Labor Shortage in Brazil was reported by Knowledge Wharton this month. The full story here: Brazil's Brain Strain: Will a Skills Shortage Dampen Growth?

Talking about labor shortage, here is an interesting DER SPIEGEL article about skilled labor shortage in Eastern Germany (via Demography Matters).

I would also like to share this: The Chronicle of Higher Education created a very interesting interactive map on the the percentage of adults with college degrees over time in the USA. Check the map here. (Hat tip: Flowing Data)

1970 - % of adults with college degrees over time in the USA

2005-9 - % of adults with college degrees over time in the USA

It's Alive !!!

Talking about the Ghost City of Zhengzhou it seems it's alive! Read about it here. (Thanks to Leonardo Monasterio for the tip)

by the way, check this video: Time-lapse video of a 15-storey prefabricated hotel in Changsha.

ps. too lazy busy to blog these days. Have a nice weekend!

Education-specific population projections

I was working on the project "Scenarios for the Brazilian labor market" when I bumped into this paper: "Projection of populations by level of educational attainment, age, and sex for 120 countries for 2005-2050" (KC et al, 2010).

It's a very interesting paper, and It's part of an ambitious project. The authors produce projections for 120 countries! (covering 93% of the world population in 2005!) by five-year age groups, sex, and four levels of educational attainment for the years 2005-2050.

You can download the paper here. The database and can be accessed here. Congratulations to the joint effort of IIASA and the Vienna Institute of Demography (VID)!

teaser: The population of India aged 20-64 by education level, 1970-2050

source: KC et al (2010)

teaser: Structure by age, sex, and level of education for South Africa for the year 2000

source: KC et al (2010)

Assorted Links

• The Brookings Papers are now entirely open access (via Freakonomics. Hat Tip: MR)
  
  
• Glaeser on Minority Populations Grow in the USA
  
  
• Edgar Pieterse on African Urbanism (at LSE public lectures) - YouTube or mp3.
  
  
• Call for papers: Urbanisation, internal migrations and demographic behaviour (Hat Tip: Ricardo Ojima)
  Deadline for submission: 1st May 2011
  
  
• Urban hierarchy of the United States over time (1790-2000) via Kelso’s Corner. [interesting paths: Chicago, Detroit, LA, Baltimore, St. Louis, Houston and NY]

China's empty city (again)

Another video on China's Ghost Cities (this one by Adrian Brown from SBS). As David Levinson said:

"If people believe that other people/firms will move there, they too will move there. If they believe it will fail, they won't and it fails. Changing expectations is critical for success."

I beleive that's the point. Chinese Urbanization has been so accelerated in recent years (mostly driven by government initiatives) that this pace seems to be leading to a sort of mismatch between future expectation and current actions of economic agents. [Ok, I recognize China must be much more complicated than that. I'm jus trying to keep it simple]

via The Transportationist

Check other posts about China here at Urban Demographics Blog.

The Economist house-price index (updated)

The Economist Magazine updated its house-price index (here),

They also published a chart of Robert Shiller’s index of real (ie, inflation-adjusted) house prices in America (1890!-2010). [Something is rotten.... and it is not Denmark]

ps. Catherine Mulbrandon posted an interesting chart on the same topic: US Housing Prices (Real vs Nominal) 1890-2010.

Love and Housing Bubbles

Nelson Rodrigues (a great Brazilian playwright, journalist and novelist) once said: "Love is eternal. If it ends, it wasn't love."

I tend to believe that housing bubbles are in some way like love. One can only be sure that there is a bubble after it burst. [Before the burst, one can always argument that rising prices are reflecting a buoyant market]

Nelson Rodrigues [photo credit: O Globo]

By the way, The Economist Magazine published a very good report on property: Bricks and slaughter. Some interesting snippets:

• Construction of exceptionally tall buildings is a reliable indicator of economic crises in the making (According to Andrew Lawrence of Barclays Capital)
  
  
• If housing were like any other consumer good, rising prices should eventually dampen demand. But since it is also seen as a financial asset, higher values are a signal to buy. And if housing were simply a financial investment, buyers might be clearer-eyed in their decision-making. [... but] the experience of buying a home is a largely emotional one.
  
  
• Brazil is thought to be short of some 8m homes
  
  
• The whole of India has fewer hotel rooms than Las Vegas
  
  
• According to Barclays Capital, more than 40% of the skyscrapers due for completion in the next six years will be in China, increasing the number of tall buildings in Chinese cities by more than half. [I tend to be skeptical about such numbers...]