Policy Insights

Janna Bergsvik (Statistics Norway), Agnes Fauske (University of Oslo) and Rannveig Kaldager Hart (Norwegian Institute of Public Health) provide a systematic discussion of policy effects on fertility since 1970 in Europe, the US, Canada and Australia.

Can a single model for forecasting migration and assessing its impact be appropriate for different European countries? The simple answer is no.

Jakub Bijak looks at how the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic had an impact on the public perception and attitudes towards risk and uncertainty, by becoming a feature of the public discourse and how it relates to the current crisis in Afghanistan.

Erich Striessnig (Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital) looks at how we can measure the progress of all these Sustainable Development Goals when the ‘Final list of proposed indicators’ contains 230 items?

In a recent paper published in the prestigious journal <em>Demography</em>, Massimo Anelli and Nicoletta Balbo asked the question: what would have happened to fertility levels in Italy if this massive emigration flow had not happened? Through this exercise, they could also understand what effect the recession on fertility levels would have been in the absence of out-migration.

<p>Commuting tends to vary over an individual’s life course: Looking specifically at women entering motherhood, they tend to reduce their commute when transitioning to parenthood. Almost one in three of the mothers surveyed by Thomas Skora, Heiko Rüger & Nico Stawarz (German Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB)) reduced their commuting distance substantially after the birth of the first child, leading to significant wage cuts.</p>
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<p>A study by Helen Kowalewska (Oxford University) and Agnese Vitali (University of Trento) suggests it is time for policies to recognise the economic fragility of female-breadwinner couples. The gendered division of paid and unpaid work within couples has transformed across industrialised countries in recent decades. In analysing this change, policymakers and academics have endorsed the ‘social investment’ agenda, promoting a shift from male-breadwinning to ‘dual-breadwinning’ among partners.</p>

<p>Per Engzell, Arun Frey & Mark Verhagen of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, Oxford University find that during the first COVID-19 lockdown in the Netherlands, students learned less than during a normal year. These results highlight the costs of keeping students out of schools and of the difficulties in compensating for these costs.</p>

<p>The risk of dying from COVID-19 is for individuals aged 70 and older in Stockholm County who live in the same household as a person of working age was 60 per cent higher compared with older people who live with other old individuals, find Maria Brandén and colleagues (Stockholm University Demography Unit).</p>

<p>Our ability to predict migration patterns is limited. Mathias Czaika and Jakub Bijak of the Horizon 2020 project QuantMig tell us five facts everyone should know before discussing future migration trends.</p>