Population change and population forecasts are receiving considerable attention from governmental planners and policy-makers, as well as from the private sector. Old patterns of population redistribution, industrial location, labor-force participation, household formation, and fertility are changing. The resulting uncertainty has increased interest in forecasting because mere extrapolations of past trends are proving inadequate. In the United States of America popUlation forecasts received even more attention after federal agencies began distributing funds for capital infrastructure to state and local governments on the basis of projected future populations. If the national government had based those funding decisions on locally prepared projections, the optimism of local officials would have resulted in billions of dollars worth of excess capacity in sewage treatment plants alone. Cabinet-level inquiries concluded that the U. S. Department of Commerce should (1) assume the responsibility for developing a single set of projections for use whenever future population was a consideration in federal spending decisions and (2) develop methods which incorporate both economic and demographic factors causing population change. Neither the projections prepared by economists at the Bureau of Economic Analysis nor those prepared by demographers at the Bureau of the Census were considered satisfactory because neither method adequately recognized the intertwined nature of demographic and economic change. Against this background, the American Statistical Association (ASA) and the U. S.

This book is designed to introduce doctoral and graduate students to the process of conducting scientific research in the social sciences, business, education, public health, and related disciplines. It is a one-stop, comprehensive, and compact source for foundational concepts in behavioral research, and can serve as a stand-alone text or as a supplement to research readings in any doctoral seminar or research methods class. This book is currently used as a research text at universities on six continents and will shortly be available in nine different languages.

We take for granted today that the assessments, measurements, and forecasts of economists are crucial to the decision-making of governments and businesses alike. But less than a century ago that wasn’t the case—economists simply didn’t have the necessary information or statistical tools to understand the ever more complicated modern economy. With Political Arithmetic, Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Fogel and his collaborators tell the story of economist Simon Kuznets, the founding of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the creation of the concept of GNP, which for the first time enabled us to measure the performance of entire economies. The book weaves together the many strands of political and economic thought and historical pressures that together created the demand for more detailed economic thinking—Progressive-era hopes for activist government, the production demands of World War I, Herbert Hoover’s interest in business cycles as President Harding’s commerce secretary, and the catastrophic economic failures of the Great Depression—and shows how, through trial and error, measurement and analysis, economists such as Kuznets rose to the occasion and in the process built a discipline whose knowledge could be put to practical use in everyday decision-making. The product of a lifetime of studying the workings of economies and skillfully employing the tools of economics, Political Arithmetic is simultaneously a history of a key period of economic thought and a testament to the power of applied ideas.

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

From Books Back Cover: Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) is best remembered today for his theories on the menace of over-population; this first ever full-length biography shows him also in his role as one of the founders of classical political economy, and still a controversial figure in the history of economic thought. Based on exhaustive research among contemporary sources, it gives an account of Malthus's two careers, as an economist and as a professor at the East India College.

This second volume of the Handbook presents professional surveys of all the important topics in urban economics. The first section contains 6 surveys on locational analysis, the second, 5 surveys of specific urban markets, and the third part presents 5 surveys of government policy issues. The book brings together exhaustive research by distinguished scholars from many countries. It is the only complete survey volume of urban economics and should serve as a reference volume to scholars and graduate students for many years. For more information on the Handbooks in Economics series, please see our home page on http://www.elsevier.nl/locate/hes--