The sparsely populated northern Sweden has been the main target area for regional policy efforts since the 1960s. A rich variety of regional policy measures have been launched over the years. However, despite this and a heavy expansion of welfare undertakings a significant depopulation has taken place. Also the first generation of EU Structural Funds show very weak structural impacts on develop...

Concerns about population growth historically revolved around the notion that there may be insufficient arable land, minerals or energy to meet the needs of an exponentially increasing population. Today they are compounded by fears that as wealth increases, so would consumption of natural resources, and that new technologies would enable further exploitation of these resources. Absent empirical...

The estimation of population parameters from genetic data can help reveal past migration patterns or past population sizes. The transformation from raw genetic data to population parameters needs a model, which should reflect the true relationships between subpopulations. Often the models are overly simplified and do not allow, for example, for differences in population sizes and differences in...

With the growing threat of pandemic influenza, efforts to improve national surveillance to better predict and prevent this disease from affecting the most vulnerable populations are being undertaken. This paper examines the utility of Medicare data to obtain age-specific influenza hospitalization rates for historical analyses. We present a novel approach to describing and analyzing age-specific...

It is conventional wisdom that Russia’s Muslim population is increasing dramatically relative to Russia’s Slavic population, and that along a variety of demographic indicators its Muslim national groups are thriving in comparison to the demographic crisis being experienced by their Slavic compatriots. Reported ethnicity data from the 2002 Russian census, released in early 2005, permit a more ri...

We consider the finite generation-time effect in virus evolution models, introducing differential equations with delay. The suggested approach more adequately describes the evolution in case of growing populations than the popular models of population genetics, especially for the viruses with large number of offspring during one life cycle. Now the mean fitness, as a coefficient for exponential...

We develop extensions of the Polya posterior that can be used to estimate population quantiles in stratified populations. In the simple case with no auxiliary information, estimates based on this extension to the Polya posterior perform similarly to the standard frequentist estimates. The Polya posterior can be extended to incorporate a variety of prior knowledge about an auxiliary characterist...

The physician workforce has steadily grown faster than the U.S. population over the past 30 years, context that is often absent in conversations anticipating physician scarcity. Policy makers addressing future physician shortages should also direct resources to ensure specialty and geographic distribution that best serves population health .

Population–environment debates in Australia are at an impasse. While the ability of this continent to sustain more migrants has attracted persistent scrutiny, nuanced explorations of diverse migrant cultures and their engagements with Australian landscapes have scarcely begun. Yet as we face the challenges of a climate changing world we would undoubtedly benefit from the most varied knowledges ...