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First published online: 30 July 2020 ; In recent years a growing body of literature has widely investigated the impact of role-play simulations in teaching politics and international relations. While scholars agree that participating in simulations is helpful for the students in developing their skills, the evidence about benefits is more mixed. Moreover, the question if all students - regardless of their demographic or academic background - benefit similarly from simulations, remains largely unanswered. This article, based on a cross-national survey submitted to students from Italy and the Netherlands who have participated in the Model United Nations (MUN), provides an innovative contribution to the current literature by looking at views and opinions of students coming from different educational contexts. Our empirical results suggest that students perceive that MUN increases their skills regardless of their academic and socio-demographic background. The quantitative analysis, based on OLS regression models, reveals that the individual students' background does not influence their perceived benefit, nor their enjoyment of the experience. MUNs appear to be educational as well as fun for all students, regardless of their age, gender, field of study, seniority, and academic homeland.

Old-age income provisions & public pension reforms & policies for member countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD) are reviewed, particularly budgetary, economic, social, demographic, & system maturation aspects. Major trends in restructuring old age pensions include reforms in extending basic provisions, social adequacy, individual equity, & redistribution of sources. Policy questions raised by the aging population are discussed, examining the effectiveness of reforms, pressure from other social programs, the pace of the reform process, & effects of a shift toward privatization. 2 Tables, 2 Charts, 32 References. M. Malas

Demographic change is perceived as a threat for wealth rather than a challenge in Germany. The debate on skilled labor shortage is a proof for this view. The paper surveys the most important German studies on skilled labor shortage. Meanwhile, a consensus on solutions has emerged in academia. Increasing the participation rates of elderly, women and facilitating qualified immigration as well as improving productivity are the mainstream recommendations. The paper provides descriptive statistical evidence that temporary agency work could contribute to solve the skilled labor shortage problem via these four channels. However, it is far from clear that productivity increases are the most important and most sustainable way out of the demographic trap. Against this background the government's demographic strategy is assessed. It turns out that the government has not a coherent strategy yet to solve the demographic issues ahead.

Intro -- Foreword -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- About the Author -- 1: Five Diseases That Are Devastating the African American Population -- Sickle Cell Disease -- Historical Background and Pathophysiology -- Epidemiology -- Clinical, Therapeutic, and Healthcare Aspects in Sickle Cell Disease -- Hypertension -- Heart Failure -- Background, Natural History, Epidemiology, and Pathophysiology -- Preventing and Treating Heart Failure -- Opioid Addiction -- Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)/Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) -- History of HIV/AIDS in the United States -- Diagnosis -- Pathophysiology and Epidemiology -- Progress in Treatment and Management of HIV/AIDS -- Conclusion -- References -- 2: Profiles in Courage: African American Medical Pioneers in the United States-The Earliest Black Practitioners -- Introduction -- The Earliest Black Medical Practitioners -- The Slave Doctors of America -- The First Licensed Black Physicians in America -- More Recent Black Medical Trailblazers -- Conclusion -- References -- 3: Evolution of the Black Physician: Medical Education and Treatment Facilities for Blacks -- Introduction -- Precursors of Black Educational and Institutional Development -- Black Institutions for Medical Education -- Black-Owned and Black-Operated Hospitals -- Conclusion -- References -- 4: The Impact of Black Medical Organizations on African American Health -- Introduction -- The History of the National Medical Association -- History of the Association of Black Cardiologists -- Conclusion -- References -- 5: Healthcare Reform Law (Obamacare): Update on "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" and the Persistence of Polarization on Repeal and Replace -- Introduction -- The Backdrop for Current Healthcare Reform Efforts -- The Most Recent Thinking on Healthcare Reform -- Conclusion -- References.

Essay 1: (co-written with Olof Åslund) We study the impact of family size on intermediate and long-term outcomes using twin births as an exogenous source of varia¬tion in family size in an unusually rich dataset. Similar to recent studies, we find no evidence of a causal effect on long-term outcomes and show that not taking selection effects into account will likely overstate the effects. We do, however, find a small but significant negative impact of family size on grades in compulsory and secondary school among children who are likely to be vulnerable to further restrictions on parental investments. Essay 2: This paper investigates the consequences of a series of Swedish policy changes beginning in 1989 where different regions started subsidizing the birth control pill. The reforms were significant and applied to all types of oral contraceptives. My identification strategy takes advantage of the fact that the reforms were implemented successively over time and targeted specific cohorts of young women, in particular teenagers. This generates plausibly exogenous variation in access to the subsidy. I first demonstrate that access significantly increased pill use. Using regional, temporal, and cohort variation in access, I then go on to examine the impact on abortions. The estimates show that the subsidy significantly decreased the abortion rate by about 8 percent. Furthermore, the results indicate that long-term access decreases the likelihood of teenage childbearing by about 20 percent. However, there is no significant effect on labor supply, marriage, educational attainment or welfare take-up. Essay 3: (co-written with Olof Åslund, Per-Anders Edin and Peter Fredriksson) We study peer effects in compulsory school performance among immigrant youth in Sweden. The empirical analysis exploits a governmental refugee placement policy that provides exogenous variation in the initial place of residence in Sweden; and it is based on tightly defined neighborhoods. There is tentative evidence that the share of immigrants in the neighborhood has a negative effect on GPA. But the main result is that, for a given share of immigrants in a neighborhood, the presence of highly educated peers of the same ethnicity has a positive effect on school grades. The results suggest that a standard deviation increase in the fraction of highly educated adults in the assigned neighborhood increases the compulsory school GPA by 0.9 percentile ranks. This magnitude corresponds roughly to a tenth of the gap in student performance between refugee immigrant and native born children. Essay 4: This paper investigates the consequences of residential segregation for immigrants' health. To this end, I make use of a rich dataset covering the entire Swedish population age 16–74 from 1987 to 2004. The dataset contains annual information on the exact diagnosis for all individuals admitted to Swedish hospitals, as well as a wide range of individual background characteristics. It is however difficult to identify the causal link between segregation and health since individuals might sort across residential areas based on unobserved characteristics related to health. To deal with this methodological problem I exploit a governmental refugee placement policy which provides plausibly exogenous variation in segregation. The OLS estimates show a statistically significant positive correlation between segregation and the probability of hospitalization. Estimates that account for omitted variables are however in general statistically insignificant.

"Portrait of America describes our nation's changing population and examines through a demographic lens some of our most pressing contemporary challenges, ranging from poverty and economic inequality to racial tensions and health disparities. Celebrated author John Iceland covers various topics, including America's historical demographic growth; the American family today; gender inequality; economic well-being; immigration and diversity; racial and ethnic inequality; internal migration and residential segregation; and health and mortality. The discussion of these topics is informed by several sources, including an examination of household survey data, and by syntheses of existing published material, both quantitative and qualitative. Iceland discusses the current issues and controversies around these themes, highlighting their role in everyday debates taking place in Congress, the media, and in American living rooms. Each chapter includes historical background, as well as a discussion of how patterns and trends in the United States compare to those in peer countries"--

The relevance of the study lies in the acute need to modernise the tools for a more accurate and comparable reflection of the demographic reality of spatial objects of different scales. This article aims to test the methods of "demographic rankings" developed by Yermakov and Shmakov. The method is based on the principles of indirect standardisation of the major demographic coefficients relative to the age structure.The article describes the first attempt to apply the method to the analysis of birth and mortality rates in 1995 and 2010 for 140 countries against the global average, and for the Baltic Sea states against the European average. The grouping of countries and the analysis of changes over the given period confirmed a number of demographic development trends and the persistence of wide territorial disparities in major indicators. The authors identify opposite trends in ranking based on the standardised birth (country consolidation at the level of averaged values) and mortality (polarisation) rates. The features of demographic process development in the Baltic regions states are described against the global and European background. The study confirmed the validity of the demographic ranking method, which can be instrumental in solving not only scientific but also practical tasks, including those in the field of demographic and social policy.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Original Title Page -- Original Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- FOREWORD -- CHAPTER 1: Introduction and Summary -- Background to This Study -- Organization of This Volume -- The Framework for Projection -- Factors Affecting Demand -- Summary of Results: Total and Per Capita Spending -- Scale, Composition and Income Effects -- Summary: How Much Does Demographic Growth Matter? -- CHAPTER 2: Personal Consumption Expenditure: Estimation from the CES Data -- Data Preparation -- The Household Projections -- Projected Household Numbers by Type and Composition -- Income Projections -- Income-Demographic Relations -- The Consumption Functions: Specification -- Income and Demographic Effects in the Equations -- Estimation of the Equations -- Use of the Equations for Projection -- Goodness of Fit -- Reasonableness of the Projections -- Interpreting the Demand Equations: Income Effects -- Age Effects -- Household Composition Effects -- Summary -- CHAPTER 3: Education: Current and School Construction Expenditures -- Background: Previous Models -- General Structure of the Model -- Enrollments and Rates by Level -- Fulltime Equivalence Adjustment -- Non-Salary Current Expenditures Per Pupil (NSCE) -- Educational Personnel Requirements -- Employee Compensation -- Public and Private Education: Enrollment and Personnel -- School Construction -- Expenditure Projections -- Decomposition of Expenditure Growth -- CHAPTER 4: Health Care Expenditures and Hospital Construction -- Background: Relation of Health Expenditures to Income Growth -- Previous Forecasting Models -- Use of Health Services and Current Expenditures -- CHAPTER 5: Housing Construction -- Background: Previous Analyses -- Structure of the Model: Housing Choices and Values -- Components of Requirements for New Housing.

One key objective of English medium instruction (EMI) programs in non-Anglophone countries is to improve students' English skills in both academic and professional environments. Despite the high cost and the popularity of the program policy, there remains a lack of empirical studies on the link between attending an EMI program and students' English proficiency. This paper employs data from 111 students majoring in international business from a top Vietnamese university to compare English competency, measured by the Duolingo Test, between students enrolled in an EMI program and their counterparts who are taught the same curriculum but in the native language, through Vietnamese medium instruction (VMI). Controlling for different social backgrounds, the study shows that participation in EMI is associated with better English test performance. Analysis using multiple interaction terms shows that male EMI participants, or students coming from lower-income households, having lower English scores in high school, and attending more English private tutoring would benefit more from EMI. The analysis sheds light on potential socioeconomic obstacles to accessing EMI and English skill development. Follow-up interviews similarly show the relevance of demographic backgrounds to the students' perceptions of EMI and their English proficiency. The study provides clear evidence of substantial associations between EMI and English skills. Further studies are needed to establish the causality of the results.

Ausgangspunkt des Berichts bildet die Frage: "Welche Zusammenhänge bestehen zwischen objektiven soziostrukturellen Merkmalen der Eltern und der Persönlichkeitsentwicklung der Studenten?" Bei knapp 6.000 Studenten, vorwiegend des 2. Studienjahres an sechs Universitäten und 13 Hochschulen, wurde im Wintersemester 1978/79 eine schriftliche anonyme Befragung im Gruppenverband durchgeführt. Fast siebzig Indikatoren waren den "Herkunfts- und Entwicklungsbedingungen der Studenten im Vorfeld ihres Studiums gewidmet". Die Merkmale des Elternhauses wurden überwiegend nach Vater und Mutter differenziert erfaßt. In Abhängigkeit dazu wurde bei den Studenten der "bisherige Bildungs- und Lebensweg, die Fachrichtungswahl und verschiedene wesentliche Persönlichkeitsmerkmale bis hin zu sexuellen Einstellungen und Verhalten und materiellen Bedingungen untersucht". Dabei ist die Verflechtung der Merkmale von großer Bedeutung. (pbb)

AbstractEarly nineteenth‐century demographic trends on sugar estates in Jamaica, the most important British Caribbean colony, are examined through the 1817–32 public slave registers. We seek evidence regarding the background to the island's 1831–2 popular insurrection, the immediate cause of the London parliament's vote in 1833 to abolish colonial slavery. Some historians argue that the revolt occurred as 'political' effect from a sudden upsurge of metropolitan anti‐slavery activism in 1830–1. They believe the uprising broke out despite improvement in enslaved people's material welfare, favoured by many slaveholders to secure population increase after the closure of the British transatlantic slave trade in 1808. Alternative 'economic' assessments judge that increasing workloads had been aggravating popular unrest before the revolt. Commercial pressures, and the imminent likelihood of emancipation, allegedly outweighed welfare concerns. The excess of slave deaths over births widened between 1817 and 1832. However, the registers show that demographic deficits resulted mainly from the ageing of the last Africa‐born cohorts. Jamaica‐born enslaved people became self‐reproducing. There was no general pre‐1831 regime deterioration. Most slaveholders sought to maintain their Jamaican assets for the long term through pro‐natalist measures, and did not expect emancipation. The revolt's causes were thus more 'political' than 'economic'.

The worldwide trend of growing elderly population is an outcome of declining fertility rate and increase in life expectancy. Demographic data on population ageing, growth rate, health and socio-economic aspects across gender, class and region has been discussed. The article has incorporated a special focus on policy measures in each of the above areas. It is advocated that all relevant stakeholders need to initiate a support framework that can enable the elderly to lead quality life with dignity. Within this overarching framework, the focus is specifically on the elderly who are marginalised and underprivileged in specific circumstances irrespective of their socio-economic background.