EU member states have a history of close nature, economic, and political ties, but their populations hold diverse attitudes towards support for the elderly. An analysis of data from the 1997 Eurobarometer Survey shows that a large majority (70%) of EU citizens living in Greece, Spain, and Portugal believe that children should care for aging parents who can no longer manage to live independently, yet only 10-18% of citizens living in Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and the Netherlands feel the same way. A negative association was found between level of socioeconomic modernization and willingness to live with disabled parents. Those in countries with higher per capita GNP, higher female labor force participation rates, and higher percentages of births outside of marriage also showed lower tendencies of adult children sharing their homes with disabled parents. The survey data also show that citizens living in social democratic countries tend to believe that the state should pay for primary care for the elderly; however, residents in Mediterranean countries are more likely to agree that the responsibility should be shared by the state and adult children. The author argues that as Mediterranean countries develop economically, rates of parents living with their adult children will decrease, and the governments of those countries will have to play a more active role in caring for the elderly.

Testing the Gompertz law (i.e. the law of geometrical progression) for elderly mortality rates has long been discussed in the literature, but tests based on a set of yearly age-specific data have not been fully explored yet. In the first part of this paper, we propose a standard operating procedure for testing Gompertz assumption using yearly age-specific mortality data. Methods used in the procedure include estimation of parameters in the Gompertz law and their standard errors via bootstrap simulation. In addition to the oldest-old (i.e. ages 80 and above) data from Japan, Sweden, France, and the U.S. (Data sources: Berkeley Mortality Database and Kannisto, 1994), a simulation study is used to demonstrate the validity of the proposed procedure. In practice the period of data collection is often prolonged to 5 or 10 years in order to accumulate sufficient sample sizes. However, a longer data collection period is likely to mix data with different attributes and cause problems in the parameters estimation. Thus, in the second part of this appear, we discuss the impacts of the data collection period and population sizes on the testing results.

Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin are experiencing below replacement fertility. Under such fertility trends, these cities will eventually face negative population growth rates. This paper applies the concept of “replacement migration” to examine how many migrants will be needed if these cities are to maintain their peak population size under a no migration situation, their peak working labor force, or their peak ratio of population aged 15-65 to that of 65 and over. The results seem to indicate that the migration volume under the scenarios of maintaining peak population size and peak working population size could provide reasonable and acceptable consequences. Furthermore, for cities experiencing below replacement fertility levels, the migration volume needed to maintain either peak population size or peak working population size varies positively with the size of the below replacement deficit.

Globalization and market reforms have significantly facilitated urbanization of the population of the People’s Republic of China. This study assesses the structural and spatial redistribution of urban population and Chinese cities since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Prior to 1978 economic reforms, the system of cities created by the Maoist regime was dominated by large and extra-large cities because of the imperatives of optimal industrialization. For national defense considerations, most of the new cities were created in the central and western interior rather than the eastern coast. Market reforms and relaxation of state control over local development since the late 1970s have allowed a large number of cities to flourish on the basis of bottom-up rural transformative development. The intrusion of global market forces has helped re-consolidate the dominance of the east coast in China’s urban development. Although small cities and towns have absorbed large number of rural migrants, large and extra-large cities have remained the most efficient and productive economic centers for capital investment and production. China’s urban development over the past five decades has been a direct outcome of state articulation and reconfiguration against different political and economic contexts. A superimposed dual-track system of urban settlements integrating the Maoist legacy of large city dominance at the top with the rapidly expending component of small cities and towns at the bottom is quickly taking shape to characterize China’s urban development and urbanization.