Marital status behaviour of women in the former Soviet Republics

This paper uses the most recent data and life table analysis to describe the marital behavior of women in the republics of the former USSR. For the first time a multistate life table analysis was used to describe the marital careers of women from all the 15 republics. In the near future, such a comparative analysis will no longer be possible due to the unavailability of statistical data, especially in some of the Asian states. The analysis shows that despite 70 years of influence by Soviet ideology and lifestyle, the institution of marriage was little subject to rapid change, and retained its traditions for each culture and its ethnic features. Marriage was a universal institution in the former USSR. The majority of the women in all of the former republics entered marriage at least once. The mean age at first marriage varies from 20.5 in Moldavia to 22.8 in Azerbaijan. The proportion of marriages that end in divorce differs from 16% in Georgia to 41% in Latvia. On average more than 30% of divorced women remarry in Latvia and Ukraine and less than 5% in Georgia.

The end of world population growth

There has been enormous concern about the consequences of human population growth for the environment and for social and economic development. But this growth is likely to come to an end in the foreseeable future. Improving on earlier methods of probabilistic forecasting, here we show that there is around an 85 per cent chance that the world's population will stop growing before the end of the century. There is a 60 per cent probability that the world's population will not exceed 10 billion people before 2100, and around a 15 per cent probability that the world's population at the end of the century will be lower than it is today. For different regions, the date and size of the peak population will vary considerably.

Doubling of world population unlikely

Most national and international agencies producing population projections avoid addressing explicitly the issue of uncertainty. Typically, they provide either a single projection or a set of low, medium and high variants, and only very rarely do they give these projections a probabilistic interpretation. Probabilistic population projections have been developed for specific industrialized countries, mostly the United States, and are based largely on time-series analysis. On a global level, time-series analysis is not applicable because there is a lack of appropriate data, and for conceptual reasons such as the structural discontinuity caused by the demographic transition. Here we report on a new probabilistic approach that makes use of expert opinion on trends in fertility, mortality and migration, and on the 90 per cent uncertainty range of those trends in different parts of the world. We have used simulation techniques to derive probability distributions of population sizes and age structures for 13 regions of the world up to the year 2100. Among other things, we find that there is a probability of two-thirds that the world's population will not double in the twenty-first century.