Volume 68

№ 1, June 2013

The Effect of Educational Attainment on Adult Mortality in the U.S.
By Robert A. Hummer and Elaine M. Hernandez

In 2011, U.S. mortality rates reached record lows for both women and men; as a result, life expectancy at birth reached record highs: 81 years for women and 76 years for men. These are impressive figures.

As recently as 1960, women's life expectancy at birth was only 73.1 years and men's only 66.6 years.2 Within 50 years, life expectancy at birth increased by 8 years for women and nearly 10 years for men.

Unfortunately, these increases in life expectancy mask very wide disparities among population groups. These differences represent critical health and social issues with important implications for policymakers. Because well-educated individuals have a much longer life expectancy, is such an accomplishment (or at least a substantial improvement) possible for other subgroups?

In this Population Bulletin, we examine educational differences in U.S. adult mortality and life expectancy. We provide a balanced and up-to-date portrait of the key results and implications of research in this area. We address five major issues: What is the current association between educational attainment and adult mortality? Have educational differences in adult mortality changed over the past 50 years? Why do such wide educational differences in adult mortality now exist? What are the policy implications of recent education-mortality research? And what are the implications of recent work in this area for future education-mortality research?

http://www.prb.org/pdf13/us-education-mortality.pdf

№ 2, November 2013

The Global Challenge of Managing Migration
By Philip Martin

The number of international migrants more than doubled between 1980 and 2010, from 103 million to 220 million. In 2013, the number of international migrants was 232 million and is projected to double to over 400 million by 2050.

About 60 percent of global migrants are in the 30 or more industrialized countries. Some 40 percent of migrants are in the 170 poorer developing countries. Almost half of the world's migrants are women, 15 percent of migrants are under 20, and less than 7 percent of all international migrants are refugees.

The most significant recent change in international migration patterns is rising South-North migration. Between 1990 and 2010, the share of all international migrants in industrialized countries rose from 53 percent to 59 percent. The largest South-North migration corridor is Mexico-United States: Over 13 million Mexicans have moved to the United States since 1990.

This Population Bulletin explains why people cross national borders, the effects of international migration on sending and receiving countries, and the struggle to improve migration management. The Bulletin examines international migration by region: North America and South America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, Africa, and Oceania, and highlights major migration and development issues, including whether remittances, the money sent home by migrant workers abroad, speed development in migrant-sending countries.

http://www.prb.org/pdf13/global-migration.pdf

Volume 69

№ 1, June 2014

Migration and the Environment
By Jason Bremner and Lori M. Hunter

Throughout human history, people have been on the move-exploring new places; pursuing work opportunities; fleeing conflict; or involuntarily migrating due to changing political, social, or environmental conditions.

Today there are an estimated 230 million international migrants, a number that is projected to double to over 400 million by 2050.1 Beyond the people who cross international borders, probably more than two to three times as many are internal migrants, people who have moved within their own countries.

The reasons for moving are complex, but over the past decade, as the evidence of global climate change has accumulated, academics, policymakers, and the media have given more attention to migration as a result of environmental change.

A major concern is whether climate change will displace large numbers of vulnerable people around the world. For example, because of rising sea levels, the population exposed to flooding during extreme storms is expected to grow dramatically over the coming decades.

The impacts of climate change will vary widely across the globe-some regions will experience drought and increased temperatures while others will experience more extreme weather such as hurricanes. But people in rural areas, where households rely daily on their local environment, will feel these effects most intensely. A widely cited article estimated that more than 25 million people were displaced by environmental factors in 1995 and claimed that as global warming takes hold, more than 200 million people could be affected by future climate change.3 Many, however, disputed these numbers and rightly clarified that scientists, particularly experts in migration, have little understanding of migration-environment relationships.

In spite of dozens of academic publications and several international conferences, well-documented cases of environmentally induced migration are mostly limited to large-scale events such as Hurricane Katrina in the United States or the tsunami that affected Indonesia, in which millions of people were displaced due to rapid and dramatic change. The still unclear long-term consequences of these types of events, as well as slower-acting forms of environmental change such as long-term droughts and soil degradation, limit our ability to predict the scale and nature of future human migration under accelerating global environmental change. New research, however, continues to shed light on the relationships between migration and the environment.

This Population Bulletin explores the relationship between migration and the environment and highlights innovative research from the Population Centers funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. This research uses new approaches to link demographic, social, and environmental science methods, enabling researchers to more explicitly link people to the environment on which they depend. This linking, combined with following people over time, permits researchers to determine how environmental change contributes to people's mobility and how migration results in environmental change.

The research suggests that the popular narrative of "environmental refugees" is oversimplified and inaccurate; rather, environmentally induced migration can be temporary, and is often within a country and over relatively short distances. Smaller numbers of people move across international borders.

Also, because of the variety of ways in which migration is a response to environmental change, policies on migration are unlikely to be adaptable enough to different situations and environmental pressures. Resilience policies and programs, however, present an opportunity to reduce the impacts of disasters and environmental change, and to assess environmental migration in context.

http://www.prb.org/pdf14/migration-and-environment.pdf

№ 2, November 2014

The demography of inequality in the United States
By Mark Mather and Beth Jarosz

A convergence of demographic trends and disparities is contributing to a new economic reality for the U.S. population, characterized by higher levels of poverty and inequality. Population aging, growing racial/ethnic diversity, changing family structure, and regional population shifts are changing the U.S. demographic landscape and exacerbating differences between the haves and the have-nots.
These demographic trends are occurring against a backdrop of rising inequality in the United States. Since the Great Recession, public discourse has focused primarily on the earnings of chief executives in comparison with low-wage workers. But broader measures of income inequality also show a growing gap between those at the top and those at the bottom.

In this Population Bulletin, we investigate the intersection between demography and inequality in the United States, with a focus on regional patterns and differences by age, race/ethnicity, gender, and family structure. We stress the importance of closing gaps in education to put the next generation of workers and their children on a path to succeed in the labor force and advance the U.S. economy.

http://www.prb.org/pdf14/united-states-inequality.pdf