Geoffrey Mcnicoll
Biographic Data
| ID | 247628 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Geoffrey Mcnicoll |
| GIVEN NAMES | Geoffrey |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcnicoll |
| SIGNATURE | MCNICOLL G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Population Council |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 199 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 286 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 199 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1968 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
On Population and the International Order
This essay expores demographic effects on the international order over the postwar decades and potentially through the next half-century. Such effects derive from the relative sizes of populations and labor forces among states, contrasts in age distributions (resulting from the regionally staggered timing of fertility decline), and high levels of international migration, fueled by economic disparities and civil conflict. In coming decades, differ…
Paul Demeny: An Appreciation
EliotDickinsonHuman Migration and the Refugee Crisis: Origins and Global ImpactBloomsbury Academic, 2023, 248 p., $61.20.JohnWashingtonThe Case for Open BordersHaymarket Books, 2023, 263 p., $19.95 (p…
The modern state, usually traced to 17th century Europe, is sovereign over a defined territory; controlling borders is an elementary function of its government. In his classic treatise from 1672 on the law of nature and nations, Samuel Pufendorf discussed the duties of a state toward “the admission of strangers.” Echoing Grotius, he acknowledged an obligation to offer refuge to persons “driven by violence out of their own country,” provided the n…
Harriet Martineau on Immigrants in Rural America
CharlesGoodhart and ManojPradhanThe Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation RevivalPalgrave‐Macmillan, 2020, 280 p., €29.99
The globalization era that began in the decades after World War II, and that may now be ending, has a prominent demographic dimension. At its outset, the moves toward trade liberalization sought to recreate the benign growth experience of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, acknowledging the harm wrought by the protectionist measures of the interwar years. The countries involved in this nascent free-trade zone were those of the compa…
TobyOrdThe Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of HumanityHachette Books, 2020, 480 p., $30.00
By existential risk the Oxford philosopher Toby Ord means the “permanent destruction of human potential.” Actual human extinction is existential, but so would be the irreversible collapse of civilization. In the latter category, for example, catastrophic climate change through a runaway greenhouse effect could yield such a future, with human population reduced to a remnant left clinging to life; a world-wide totalitarian regime, self-perpetuating…
MatthewYglesiasOne Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger. Portfolio, 2020. 288 p. $28.00
In 1972, the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future delivered its report to President Nixon. Commission chairman John D. Rockefeller III summarized its findings in his transmission letter: “After two years of concentrated effort, we have concluded that, in the long run, no substantial benefits will result from further growth of the Nation's population... We have looked for, and have not found, any convincing economic argument for…
DanielMaul, The International Labour Organization: 100 Years of Global Social Policy, De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2020. 301 p. $79.99
The eventful history of the International Labour Organization is a rich target for scholarly attention. This it receives in the present volume, commissioned to mark the ILO's centenary. The author, Daniel Maul, is a historian in the Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo. Much more than a house history, his study is a broadly sympathetic but not uncritical accounting of the ILO's accomplishments, along with the story of its successes and failu…
Lawrence A.PalinkasGlobal Climate Change, Population Displacement, and Public Health: The Next Wave of MigrationSpringer International Publishing, 2020. 234 p. €94.63
The markers of climate change are both the gradual rise in ambient temperatures and sea levels and the greater frequency and magnitude of the extreme events (droughts, fires, hurricanes, floods) accompanying those rises. Any of these conditions may induce or compel the people affected to move. The moves may be more or less voluntary, in-country or international, and temporary or permanent. The movers are all, in Lawrence Palinkas's expansive cate…
International Organization for Migration, Migration in West and North Africa and across the Mediterranean: Trends, Risks, Development and GovernanceGeneva, 2020. 458 p. Free download at IOM Online Boo…
“Irregular” African migrants and asylum seekers heading to Europe mainly choose the so-called Central Mediterranean Route (CMR) from Libya to Italy or Malta or the Western Mediterranean Route from Morocco or Algeria to Spain. (There is also an Eastern Mediterranean Route, the Aegean crossing from Turkey to Greece, the preference of migrants from West Asia.) The three dozen research papers compiled in this substantial edited volume from the Intern…
International Migration: Approaches, Issues, Policies
GöranTherbornCities of Power: The Urban, the National, the Popular, the GlobalLondon: Verso, 2017. 408 p. $35.00
Göran Therborn is an eminent Swedish sociologist with a bent toward wide-ranging comparative studies. In an earlier work, Between Sex and Power: Family in the World, 1900–2000 (2004) (reviewed by A. Dharmalingam in PDR 34, no. 1), he sought to characterize and locate broad patterns of family organization. Families, he argued, could be roughly marshaled by their variants of patriarchy, marriage, and fertility, and the exercise of (male) power with…
UlfHannerzWriting Future Worlds: An Anthropologist Explores Future ScenariosPalgrave Macmillan, 2016. xi + 295 p. $119.00
The feedstock of anthropology was once the remote and exotic societies encountered by Western travelers and colonizers. Later practitioners of the discipline turned their attention toward more familiar cultural reaches, not least in looking afresh at their own societies or at groups within them. Their tools were the same, entailing close observation at a wider aperture and shorter focal length than those of the sociologist. Almost any defining ch…
Ipat (Impact, Population, Affluence, and Technology)
Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth by Alison Bashford (review)
Reviewed by: Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth by Alison Bashford Geoffrey McNicoll Alison Bashford. Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. xii + 466 pp. Ill $50.00 (9-780231-147668). This fascinating, deeply researched book is a history of thinking about world population from the 1920s to the 1960s. The thinkers are primarily Western scholars and public inte…
Joseph H. Carens, The Ethics of Immigration
Robert A. McLeman, Climate and Human Migration: Past Experiences, Future Challenges
Asian Tigers, African Lions: Comparing the Development Performance of Southeast Asia and Africa
Why growth rates differ has long been a fertile subject for economists. Investigators approach it with a range of research strategies, yielding, at one extreme, exercises in growth accounting, and
Jay Winter and Michael Teitelbaum, The Global Spread of Fertility Decline: Population, Fear, and Uncertainty
Xuefei Ren, Urban China
Reflections on Post-Transition Demography
Ronald Lee and Andrew Mason, Population Aging and the Generational Economy: A Global Perspective
Achievers and Laggards in Demographic Transition: A Comparison of Indonesia and Nigeria
over the last 50 years many developing countries have experienced demographic transitions from high to low death and birth rates; others have barely begun that process.what explains that delay?among broad regions the most striking contrast in this respect, as also in development performance more generally, has been between east asia and sub-Saharan africa-regions that many observers in the 1950s and even 1960s would have seen as similarly placed …
David Willetts: The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children's Future-And Why They Should Give It Back
Legacy, Policy, and Circumstance in Fertility Transition
Divergent fertility trends in the course of development are commonly ascribed to differences in state action-that is, to government policy, deliberate or inadvertent. However, fertility outcomes can also, often more persuasively, be traced to differences in cultural and institutional inheritance and in the supply and growth potential of human capital. These are materials that states and societies find themselves endowed with-in brief, their legac…
Institutional Determinants of Fertility Change
Explanations for fertility change in terms of shifts in institutional settings often highly plausible are in most cases anecdotal after the fact accounts. To give status as theory to such accounts requires tracing out conceptually and empirically how the setting impinges on behavior. This impact may come not only from changes in perceived costs of particular behaviors amenable to analysis using conventional consumer choice assumptions but also (a…
An Interpretation of Fertility and Population Policy in Kenya
After almost two decades of government-sponsored efforts to reduce population growth, Kenya's fertility level and rate of natural increase are both at peaks rarely attained in the recorded experience of national populations. Total fertility is close to eight births per woman; natural increase is about 4 percent per year. While the achievement of a sufficient pace of economic growth to permit improvement in per capita income despite this demograph…
The New Social Contract: An Inquiry into Modern Contractual Relations
The Agenda of Population Studies: A Commentary and Complaint
Since 1950 modern demographic history has witnessed more than a doubling of world population a rise of over 15 years in life expectancy and a decline of average total fertility rate from 5 to 3.5 children/woman. The next 79 years will see a final doubling of population size with aging societies. Human aspirations will be constrained by environmental stresses. Demography has roots in classical political economy with malthus as progenitor and is co…
Changing Fertility Patterns and Policies in the Third World
Average fertility in the third world has fallen from 6 children per woman in the 1960s to about 4 in the 1980s. Global population growth, however, is still adding nearly a billion people a decade-a process that has large, mostly adverse, welfare implications. Fertility trends in the main third world regions and in selected countries are described. Differences in social and political organization, economic conditions, cultural orientations, and po…
Short Reviews
Books reviewed in this article: Martin Carnoy, Sustaining the New Economy: Work, Family, and Community in the Information Age Joop Garssen, Joop De Beer, Lieneke Hoeksma, Kees Prins, And Rolf Verhoef (Eds.), Vital Events: Past, Present and Future of the Dutch Population International Fund for Agricultural Development, Rural Poverty Report 2001: The Challenge of Ending Rural Poverty Andrew Mason and Georges Tapinos (Eds.), Sharing the Wealth: Demo…
Short Reviews
Books reviewed in this article: Gay Becker, The Elusive Embryo: How Women and Men Approach New Reproductive Technologies Theodore Caplow, Louis Hicks, and Ben J. Wattenberg, The First Measured Century: An Illustrated Guide to Trends in America, 1900–2000 Stephen Moore and Julian L. Simon, It's Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years Elisabeth Croll, Endangered Daughters: Discrimination and Development in Asia Barbar…
Short Reviews
Books reviewed in this article: Lourdes Benería with Savitri Blsnath (eds.), Gender and Development: Theoretical, Empirical and Practical Approaches Margaret Jolly and Kalpana Ram (eds.), Borders of Being: Citizenship, Fertility, and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific John Loxley, Interdependence, Disequilibrium and Growth: Reflections on the Political Economy of North‐South Relations at the Turn of the Century William Petersen, From Birth to Deat…
Consequences of Rapid Population Growth: An Overview and Assessment
An Analytical Survey of Population and Development in Bangladesh
This paper is titled an Analytical Survey. As a survey it sets out to collect and pull together what is know from the many studies and detailed aspects of population and development in Bangladesh. And as an analysis it sets out to make sense of a complex situation, to pick out the various economic, social, demographic and environmental forces that shape Bangladesh's present predicament and set the bounds for its future possibilities. \n\nTwo part…
Policy Lessons of the East Asian Demographic Transition
The usual lessons drawn from East Asia's striking experience of health and fertility transition concern the efficacy of well-designed government programs catering to an existing or ideationally stimulated demand. An alternative interpretation sees the demographic change—and the uptake of services—as a byproduct of social and economic development together with, in some cases, strong government pressures. This article probes more deeply into this e…
Human Development Report 1995
Population Weights in the International Order
Relative population sizes play little part in the international system. A state's economic and military power is influenced by population size, but as one factor among many. Formal relations among states exclude population from consideration by the principle of sovereign equality. Three sources of possible change in this situation are explored, in which states would be "population-weighted" to a greater degree than before. Convergence of producti…
At Risk: Natural Hazards, People's Vulnerability, and Disasters
Achievers and Laggards in Demographic Transition: A Comparison of Indonesia and Nigeria
over the last 50 years many developing countries have experienced demographic transitions from high to low death and birth rates; others have barely begun that process.what explains that delay?among broad regions the most striking contrast in this respect, as also in development performance more generally, has been between east asia and sub-Saharan africa-regions that many observers in the 1950s and even 1960s would have seen as similarly placed …
The Political Demography of the World System, 2000-2050
On Population Growth and Revisionism: Further Questions
This article poses and answers 5 questions pertaining to the consequences of population growth for economic development. 1) Why is it difficult to assess the consequences of population growth? 2) To what extent are conclusions built into methodological and modeling assumptions? 3) Are major issues neglected in the mainline economic treatment of effects? 4) How much of the debate is due to divergent value premises? 5) To what extent are conclusion…
World Population 1950–2000: Perception and Response
Internal Migration in Indonesia: Descriptive Notes
The major reason for the small attention hitherto given to the study of internal migration in Indonesia has been the in adequacy of the relevant statistics.This is a pervasive prob lem for Indonesian demography; even the estimates of vital rates are open to considerable doubt.However, two new sources of in formation are now becoming available: the 1961 census and the 1964/65 National Sample Survey.When taken in conjunction with a number of other …
Community-Level Population Policy: An Exploration
For the less developed countries of the world the most promising means of reducing birthrates is to reduce the size of the group within which the costs of children are spread and to which the benefits of lowered fertility would accrue. This course of population policy development is the focus of the discussion; the context of the discussion is restricted to the rural sector of densely populated countries with relatively low levels of industrializ…
Legacy, Policy, and Circumstance in Fertility Transition
Divergent fertility trends in the course of development are commonly ascribed to differences in state action-that is, to government policy, deliberate or inadvertent. However, fertility outcomes can also, often more persuasively, be traced to differences in cultural and institutional inheritance and in the supply and growth potential of human capital. These are materials that states and societies find themselves endowed with-in brief, their legac…
Short Reviews
Books reviewed in this article: Reginaijd Applbyard (Ed.), Emigration Dynamics in Developing Countries. Volume IV: The Arab Region James R. Carey and Debra S. Judge, Longevity Records: Life Spans of Mammals, Birds, Amphibians, Reptiles, and Fish Bart J. de Bruijn, Foundations of Demographic Theory: Choice, Process, Context Laurie Garrett, Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health Ellen M. Gee and Gloria M. Gutman (Eds.). The Oversel…
The European Peopling of Australasia: A Demographic History 1788-1988
Regions at Risk: Comparisons of Threatened Environments
Critical environmental regions - concepts, distinctions and issues Amazonia the Aral Sea basin the Nepal middle mountains the Ukambani region of Kenya the Llano Estacado of the American Southern High Plains the Basin of Mexico the North Sea the Ordos Plateau of China the eastern Sunderland region of South-East Asia comparisons and conclusions
Large-Scale Simulation Models in Population and Development: What Use to Planners
Large-scale simulation modeling is a highly visible arrival on the population and development scene-one that commands increasing resources year by year. In 1967 only a few modestsized existed, and only one, the General Electric Company's TEMPO-I, was in wide use. By 1975 at least a dozen large models were in various stages of construction and operation; more were in the planning stage. Each of these models consists of a detailed, recursive comput…
Internal Migration in Indonesia: Descriptive Notes
The major reason for the small attention hitherto given to the study of internal migration in Indonesia has been the in adequacy of the relevant statistics.This is a pervasive prob lem for Indonesian demography; even the estimates of vital rates are open to considerable doubt.However, two new sources of in formation are now becoming available: the 1961 census and the 1964/65 National Sample Survey.When taken in conjunction with a number of other …
Net Migration Between Java and the Outer Islands 1
1These Comments, which follow on the article ‘Manpower in Indonesia’ by Professor W. Brand in Bulltin No. 11, are excerpts from a chapter contributed by the author to a forthcoming book on Indonesian population edited by Nathan Keyfitz and Widjojo Nitisastro
Trade and Growth in the Philippines. An Open Dual Economy
Population, Modernization, and Social Structure . Calvin Goldscheider
Large-Scale Simulation Models in Population and Development: What Use to Planners
Large-scale simulation modeling is a highly visible arrival on the population and development scene-one that commands increasing resources year by year. In 1967 only a few modestsized existed, and only one, the General Electric Company's TEMPO-I, was in wide use. By 1975 at least a dozen large models were in various stages of construction and operation; more were in the planning stage. Each of these models consists of a detailed, recursive comput…
Community-Level Population Policy: An Exploration
For the less developed countries of the world the most promising means of reducing birthrates is to reduce the size of the group within which the costs of children are spread and to which the benefits of lowered fertility would accrue. This course of population policy development is the focus of the discussion; the context of the discussion is restricted to the rural sector of densely populated countries with relatively low levels of industrializ…
The Borrie Report: Issues of Population Policy in Australia
Australia presents two divergent images to the outside world. On the one hand it is in the title of recent study a small rich industrial country highly urbanized member of OECD. On the other hand it is sparsely settled arid continent geographically remote from the industrialized world its interior largely desert its wealth deriving from unprocessed agricultural and mineral exports. Both images are of course true and it is the demographic perspect…
Large-Scale Simulation Models in Population and Development: A Reply
Population and development: Outlines for a structuralist approach
On Fertility Policy Research
An understanding of the nature and scope of high-fertility problems and their ties to social change and development policy is essential to fertility policy formation. The current research base for fertility policy is based on 3 components: 1) projection models showing the apparent economic payoffs of lower birth rates; 2) KAP surveys indicating limited knowledge of and access to effective fertility control methods and an actual fertility level ab…
An Analytical Survey of Population and Development in Bangladesh
This paper is titled an Analytical Survey. As a survey it sets out to collect and pull together what is know from the many studies and detailed aspects of population and development in Bangladesh. And as an analysis it sets out to make sense of a complex situation, to pick out the various economic, social, demographic and environmental forces that shape Bangladesh's present predicament and set the bounds for its future possibilities. \n\nTwo part…
Population Growth of Indonesia: An Analysis of Fertility and Mortality Based on the 1971 Population Census
Analyzes data on fertility and mortality by province for all Indonesia and by regency and municipality for fertility in Java. Data are derived from the 1971 census and refer to the decade 1961-70. The completeness and accuracy of the 1971 census are assessed after which historical trends and differentials in mortality and fertility are discussed. A closer focus on fertility in densely populated Bali and Java considers provincial and regional fert…
Institutional Determinants of Fertility Change
Explanations for fertility change in terms of shifts in institutional settings often highly plausible are in most cases anecdotal after the fact accounts. To give status as theory to such accounts requires tracing out conceptually and empirically how the setting impinges on behavior. This impact may come not only from changes in perceived costs of particular behaviors amenable to analysis using conventional consumer choice assumptions but also (a…
The New Social Contract: An Inquiry into Modern Contractual Relations
Population Growth: Current Issues and Strategies
The world population was 4.5 billion in 1981; it will be 6.1 billion in the year 2000 and probably over 9 billion by 2050; most of the worlds population will be concentrated in Africa Latin America and Asia. Even if the overall worlds growth rate is probably as low as 1.7% due to fertility decrease in all developing countries the yearly absolute increase in population is continuing to rise. The worlds birth rate is currently around 28/1000 and de…
Recent Demographic Trends in Indonesia
Indonesias population trends in the 1970s are described on the basis of findings from the 1980 census. Mortality has steadily improved although it remains high by regional standards; the total fertility rate fell by 17% over the decade to the late 1970s with Java and Sumatra showing the largest declines. Projections assuming a substantial slowing of the growth rate still indicate a population of 200 million by the year 2000. (authors)
Fertility and Kinship in the Philippines
Down to Earth: Environment and Human Needs
Consequences of Rapid Population Growth: An Overview and Assessment
Reasons and Persons
Population Perspectives: Statements by World Leaders
Population Control in China: Theory and Applications
Chinas pressing situation of high population growth rates compelled demographers and scientists to develop a model capable of expressing the dynamics of population changes under the countrys planned birth policy thus reflecting the reality of the country. They developed a planned birth model or macro-model of population control consisting of a system of controlled dynamic population equations. This macro-model has been successfully used in Chinas…
Are World Population Trends a Problem
The Land Is Shrinking: Population Planning in Asia . Gayl D. Ness , Hirofumi Ando
International Trade and the Future of the West
Sociology (124 works) · Political science (115 works) · Population (107 works) · Demography (100 works) · Economics (87 works) · Geography (80 works) · Development economics (45 works) · Law (45 works) · History (38 works) · Economic growth (30 works)