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Home > IUSSP Activity Reports > Activity Report 2001
(Revised September 2002)
The International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP, www.iussp.org) is the leading international association for individuals interested in population studies. The IUSSP network includes almost 2000 members worldwide, one third of whom are from developing countries. By organising conferences, publishing scientific information and fostering communication, the IUSSP stimulates interest in demographic matters among governments, national and international organisations, scientific bodies and the general public. These activities are supported by grants from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), a number of European governments (chiefly France, the Netherlands, Norway, and Denmark), major foundations (Mellon, MacArthur, Hewlett, the Wellcome Trust, and others), as well as membership dues.
The effectiveness of the Union is enhanced by the fact that it is a multilingual organization, the two principal languages being English and French. The Union's main regular publication is its bilingual Bulletin, published three times annually. The Union is organised as an association of individuals, with its secretariat in Paris, and holds a General Assembly every four years. The last General Assembly was held in August 2001 in Brazil and the next is scheduled to be held in 2005 in France.
The IUSSP's traditional mainstay has been the work of its scientific committees and working groups. An up-to-date list of all recent committee activities is to be found online here. Committees and Working Groups held seven conferences and seminars held in 2001, up from four in 2000. These were as follows:
Conference on Population Ageing in Industrialised Countries: Challenges and Issues
Tokyo, Japan, 19-21 March 2001
The purpose of this Conference, co-organized by the IUSSP Committee on Population Age Structure and Public Policy and the Nihon University Population Research Institute (NUPRI), was to examine the consequences of strong fertility declines and population ageing in post-transitional countries. The conference included seven sessions covering the following topics: age-structural transitions in industrialized countries (an overview of the process); the consequences of age-structural transitions on the family, the government and the market; the status of the elderly in industrialized countries; newly emerging research opportunities and policy implications of age-structural transitions. To see the Report of the Conference, click here .
Seminar on International Perspectives on Low Fertility: Trends, theories and policies
Tokyo, Japan, March 21-23, 2001
This seminar was organised by the IUSSP Working Group on Low Fertility in collaboration with the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (Japan). Papers presented applied demographic methodologies to cross-national comparisons of low fertility, described and explained low fertility in particular national or regional settings, took a more theoretical approach to the explanation of low fertility, and drew implications for policies to address low fertility. The Report of the seminar is posted on the IUSSP website at. To see the Report of the Conference, click here .
Seminar on Social Interaction in the Production and Circulation of Knowledge
Providence, USA, 20-25 March, 2001
The IUSSP Committee on Anthropology and Demography held its seminar "Social Interaction in the Production and Circulation of Population Knowledge" at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island on 20-25 March, 2001. This impetus for this workshop came from a series of questions about the design, implementation and evaluation of population based programmes and from a linked set of questions concerning the role of social processes in fertility change. Papers presented approached the social processes involved in the production and circulation of population knowledge from two directions. On the one hand, participants were interested in describing the flows of scientific and policy knowledge from global actors through national programmes to local consumers and the flow of local knowledge to global actors. At the same time, as anthropologists, the participants were interested in examining these flows in the context of recent theories of globalisation, culture and social interaction. To see the Report of the seminar, please click here. This conference was supported, in part, by the Mellon Foundation and the Hewlett Foundation.
Seminar on Demographic Teaching in the Third Millennium
Rabat, Morocco, 118 May, 2001.
This IUSSP seminar reviewed current knowledge and developments in the field. Participants of the workshop not only presented their work on training strategies, but they also discussed the nature of demography itself in the face of rapid change. The workshop initially examined the state of demographic training in different areas of the world, then participants examined new needs and demands for demographers in the future and finally discussed new strategies, topics and tools for training in demography. To see the Report of the seminar, please click here. The Hewlett Foundation and UNFPA provided financial support.
Seminar on the Population History of the Second Millennium
Florence, Italy, June 2001
This seminar was divided into two parts. In the first, commissioned authors were asked to provide, for 12 major world regions, population totals over the second millennium, and as far as data permit, to discuss how such changes were brought about. One innovation of the seminar's design was that instead of authors presenting their papers, two invited discussants were asked to review the 12 regional papers, offering arguments and syntheses of their own. The second part of the conference consisted of 12 thematic papers and followed a traditional framework, with each author presenting his or her papers. To see the Report of the seminar, please click here.
Seminar on Health Consequences of Longer Life: disability and quality of life
Beijing, China, October 22-27, 2001
The IUSSP Committee on Health and Longevity, China Population Association, and Healthy Ageing and Family Studies Center of Peking University jointly organised this seminar, which was divided into three parts. The IUSSP Seminar on "Longer Life and Healthy Ageing," held October 22-24, 2001 at Peking University Campus in Beijing was on IUSSP invitation only. To see abstracts of all papers presented, click here. The "International Symposium on Healthy Ageing Studies in China". October 25, 2001 at Peking University Campus in Beijing was open to the public). Four sessions included presentations of twelve academic papers, four international discussants' comments and open discussions, with simultaneous translation between English and Chinese. Finally, a Training Workshop on Healthy Ageing Research Methods, held 26-27 October at Peking University Campus in Beijing was open to all qualified applicants outside and inside China. To see a list of training sessions and resource persons, click here.
Conference on Age Structure Transitions and Policy Dynamics: The allocation of public and private resources across generations
Taipei, Taiwan, 6-8 December 2001.
This conference, organised jointly by the IUSSP committee on Population Age Structure and Public Policy and Institute of Economics of Academica Sinica, focused on innovative work on the allocation of public and private resources across generations, including work at the macro- and micro-level. The conference will not focus on any geographical area, but will instead bring together leading scholars working with new datasets, new methods of analysis, or new modelling techniques. To see the Report of the seminar, please click here.
In recent years the Union has reached out beyond traditional Committee work to embrace other forms of scientific collaboration and communication.
Population-Environment Research Network
Funded by the MacArthur Foundation, the Population and Environment Research Network (PERN) is an academic web-based information source on current population and environment research worldwide. The network aims to stimulate greater communication about, and the advancement of, methodologies and approaches to population-environment research. It does this through maintaining an up-to-date online searchable database of electronically available literature, as well as by hosting occasional cyber-seminars on current research topics. The target audiences are institutions and individual researchers around the world, from disciplines including demography, geography, anthropology, history, political science, ecology, biology, environmental studies as well as all others interested or actively involved in population and environment research. The IUSSP and the International Human Dimensions of Global Change Programme (IHDP) jointly sponsor the project. In 2001, the PERN network became fully operational.
Among other PERN activities in 2001, the public cyber-seminar focused on the statement on "Population in Sustainable Development" prepared by the Global Science Panel on Population and Environment (see below) for the to Earth Summit 2002 in Johannesburg stands out. Beginning in October 2001, a special listserve hosted discussion and stimulated feedback on the preliminary science statement of the GSP. Dozens of participants touched on many key themes, providing significant feedback to the panel, and stimulating dialogue among the Network membership. Weekly summaries were compiled and distributed through the listserve. (See description, archived messages and summaries at cyber-seminars.)
PERN was able to carry out a number of important activities in conjunction with the General Population Conference held in Brazil (see below). These activities are fully described in the report available online at http://www.populationenvironmentresearch.org/papers/IUSSP2001summary.doc
Asia Population Network (APN)
Alone among the major world regions, Asia does not have a regional population association. The Asian Population Network is a broad internet-based network of individual demographers and other population experts in the region and beyond which may serve as a precursor to a new regional association. IUSSP members in Asia form the nucleus of the APN, which is funded by the Wellcome Trust, and IUSSP acts as co-sponsor of the network. APN is based at the Asian MetaCentre for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis, housed at National University of Singapore. For a report on activities in 2001, which included both research and training workshops, please see http://www.populationasia.org/workshop_reports.htm
Global Science Panel on Population and Environment
The goal of the Global Science Panel on Population and Environment is to prepare a scientific state-of-the-art assessment about the role and incorporation of the population focus in sustainable development and to build a substantive bridge between the Rio and Cairo processes. The Panel, organised by IUSSP, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), and the United Nations University (UNU) with financial support from UNFPA, is under the joint patronage of Maurice Strong and Nafis Sadik and consists of 20-25 distinguished scientists from different relevant disciplines. The Panel held its first meeting at NIDI on 16 July, 2001 with twenty participants in attendance; the agenda and a summary of discussions can be seen at http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Admin/INF/hague/results.html?sb=6 . A second draft of the Earth Summit 2000 Statement will be discussed in a cyber-seminar in late February and the Global Science Panel at its 21-23 March 2002 meeting at IIASA will approve the Final Statement.
The most significant scientific activity of the Union in 2001 was the holding of the 24th IUSSP General Population Conference that took place at Salvador, Brazil on 18-24 August, 2001.
Participation
994 participants (not counting accompanying persons) attended the conference, 46 percent female, and 54 percent male. Details on the nationality of these participants, representing researchers, policy makers, and representatives of civil society, are given in Tables 1 and 2. While not all participants were members, the great majority were (it was cheaper to join before the Conference than to pay the higher non-member registration fee). Therefore, a comparison of the origin of Conference participants and Union membership (as of July 2001) is of interest. As shown in Table 1, the main feature of note was over-representation of Latin America and under-representation of Asia and Africa; this can be easily explained by differential travel costs and the strong efforts of the National Organising Committee (including substantial investment of own-resources) to attract national and regional participants.
Table 1: Regional breakdown of Conference participants and IUSSP membership
| Region | Conference | Members |
| North America | 19.0% | 23.1% |
| Europe | 24.4% | 33.1% |
| Latin America | 34.9% | 9.3% |
| Africa | 9.4% | 14.1% |
| Asia | 9.3% | 18.0% |
| Other | 2.9% | 2.4% |
The global distribution of participation represents a marked improvement over that achieved in Beijing four years ago where, for example, there were virtually no African participants. This success was made possible by the relatively abundant resources (including grants from UNFPA, the MacArthur Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, Wellcome Trust, UNAIDS and the Government of France), which were available to support participants. The IUSSP supported 178 participants, of whom 122 (including 3 staff members) received full support and 56 received partial support. Priority was given to session organisers, discussants, participants in plenary debate sessions (see below), and authors of regular-session papers. Between the IUSSP and the National Organising Committee, which raised very substantial national resources, the conference organizers were able to support all priority participants who requested funds. The residual item in the IUSSP budget was the number of poster session organisers whom we would be able to support: in the event, IUSSP was able to support 26 poster authors. Priority in allocating these residual funds was given to participants from institutions in low-income countries whose home institutions were able to offer partial support. Remaining funds were allocated on an ad hoc basis to encourage participation from countries that would otherwise have been un-represented at the conference, such as Vietnam, Eritrea, Estonia, and others.
To see the final list of participants in the conference, please click here
Table 2: Countries represented by 10 or more participants
| Argentina | 24 (15 female, 9 male) |
| Australia | 17 (6 female, 11 male) |
| Bangladesh | 11 (2 female, 9 male) |
| Belgium | 10 (1 female, 9 male) |
| Brazil | 259 (161 female, 98 male) |
| Canada | 26 (7 female, 19 male) |
| China | 10 (3 female, 7 male) |
| France | 66 (33 female, 33 male) |
| Germany | 10 (4 female, 6 male) |
| India | 39 (12 female, 27 male) |
| Italy | 30 (15 female, 15 male) |
| Mexico | 33 (22 female, 11 male) |
| Netherlands | 10 (2 female, 8 male) |
| Russia | 11 (4 female, 7 male) |
| Spain | 14 (5 female, 9 male) |
| UK | 43 (19 female, 24 male) |
| US | 163 (63 female, 100 male) |
Programme
The complete Conference programme may be viewed by clicking here. Of particular importance are
All three of these documents are available both in English and French. These, in addition to Portuguese, were the conference languages. Simultaneous interpretation was available for all paper sessions and plenary sessions.
There were 88 traditional paper sessions with four papers apiece, thus approximately 350 scientific papers were presented. One innovation - setting and enforcing strict time guidelines for presenters was well received. 500 submissions were accepted as posters; the number actually presented was substantially less because limited funding for poster presenters was available. However, all accepted poster abstracts were published in the Conference Book of Abstracts, as were abstracts from the paper sessions. All papers and poster presentations received in time were published on the web as well as on a CD-ROM distributed at the Conference.
In addition to regular scientific paper presentation sessions and poster sessions, several special sessions were held:
Four plenary debate sessions encouraged discussion of controversial population policy questions. Following short presentations by leading experts (two on each side of the question), participants from the audience were invited to intervene by lining up at one of two stage microphones, one for those on each side of the debate. The questions selected for debate and the panels were:
These debate sessions were enthusiastically attended and virtually all participants agreed that they were a valuable innovation. It is planned to put summaries of the debate sessions on the IUSSP website, and we are in the process of assembling edited contributions.
A Science Policy session, co-sponsored by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) discussed the contribution of population scientists to international policy initiatives on sustainable development.
Three skill building sessions - Communicating with Peers, Communicating with General Audiences, and Communicating with the Media - were held to help conference participants to increase their effectiveness. These sessions were prepared in collaboration with the Alan Guttmacher Institute. Another session gave conference participants the chance to meet with editors of major journals in the field.
Other innovations at the Brazil General Conference which were well received by members include: the Cyber Café, the computer room where presenters could prepare their presentations in PowerPoint, a luncheon for IUSSP Scientific Committee Chairs and poster presentations by IUSSP Scientific Committees.
Evaluation
In mid-November, English and French evaluation questionnaires were sent to Conference participants. Approximately 150 have been returned to date (12.01.02) and analysis of the questionnaires is underway.
Three new titles appeared in the IUSSP-Oxford University Press Studies in International Demography series, the same number as in 2000. These new titles were as follows:
1. Fertility Transition in South Asia
Zeba Ayesha Sathar and James F. Phillips, Oxford University Press, 2001 - 434p
2. Cultural Perspectives on Reproductive Health
Carla Makhlouf Obermeyer, Oxford University Press, 2001 - 333p
3. Asian Population History
Ts'ui-jung Liu, James Lee, David Sven Reher, Osamu Saito and Wang Feng, Oxford University Press, 2001 - 451p
Finally, a new Policy Research Report, the first since 1999 was published. This was
PRP N°19, "Population Ageing in Industrialized Countries: Challenges and Issues",
Gustavo De Santis, 2001. IUSSP web site publication.
During 2001, the new IUSSP Secretariat in Paris began operation in the Union's new offices housed at Institut National d'Etudes Démographiques (INED) in Paris. Despite minor anticipated disruptions and shortages of office space, Union activities were able to continue more or less uninterrupted. Among the most important of these were the February, 2001 meeting of the IUSSP Nominations Committee and the election of the 2002-2005 Council, which was carried out by postal ballot with a participation rate of 40%. The results were as follows (members marked with an asterisk were re-elected members of the 1998-2001 Council):
Honorary President: Magno de Carvalho, José Alberto (Brazil)
Vice-President: Zlotnik, Hania (Mexico)
Secretary General and Treasurer: Kritz, Mary (USA)
Council: Basu*, Alaka (India); Caselli, Graziella (Italy); Casterline, John (USA); Coleman*, David (United Kingdom); McDonald, Peter (Australia); Sathar, Zeba (Pakistan); Simmons*, Alan (Canada); Trussell*, James (USA); Yi, Zeng (China).
In 2001, 116 new members were elected (as opposed to 96 in 2000) and 52 student associates were accepted (as opposed to 32 in 2000). The membership database was completely revamped and updated in Access. Current membership stands at about 1800.
The move from Belgium to France involved the registration of the IUSSP as an Association in France. This took place on 18 September 2000. Although the IUSSP is a single organisation, legally the IUSSP as registered in France is a separate legal entity from the IUSSP as registered in Belgium. The accounts for 2001 therefore show a situation where the IUSSP appears to be an entirely new organisation. Once the affairs of the IUSSP in Belgium are completely wound up, the assets will be able to be transferred and will then show up in the accounts of the IUSSP as registered in France. By the end of 2001 this had not yet occurred.
The accounts for the IUSSP have been prepared by the Union's accountants, Arice, and audited by Ernst and Young. The 2001 accounts cover the 15 month period from the registration of the Union in France at the end of September 2000. In 2001 the Union received income of €uros 1,633,517, of which €uros 1,350,030 was income from grants. Expenditure in 2001 totalled €uros 1,183,207 of which €uros 924,839 was on scientific activities. This gave rise to a surplus of €uros 450,309. The surplus was created by a lower than anticipated level of expenditure in 2001, partly due to the focus of activities on the General Conference and partly due to difficulties in correctly anticipating the level of outlays required in the new location. The unanticipated surplus however provided the IUSSP with a much-needed opportunity to start to rebuild its reserves which were depleted entirely as a result of the transition from Belgium to France. Provision has been made for future expenses and reserves have been established which will allow for long term planning of innovative scientific activities. The goal of the Council is to establish a level of reserves to ensure the continued sound operations of the Union.
A full agenda of scientific activities is planned for 2002, as follows:
Asian Regional Population Conference
The IUSSP in collaboration with the College of Population Studies, Chulalongkorn University will organise the first Asia Regional Population Conference, entitled "Southeast Asia's Population in a Changing Asian Context" from 10-13 June in Bangkok, Thailand. This conference will provide a major forum for population and development experts, policy makers, program managers and others to discuss rapidly changing population dynamics in Southeast Asia, to consider key operational and policy issues relevant to population and development themes, to foster and encourage closer collaboration among population centres in the region, to network outside the region, and to synthesize lessons learned based on Southeast Asian's experiences to guide policies and programs elsewhere in Asia and beyond. It is hoped that over 300 experts will attend. Dr. Mercedes Concepción chairs the IOC for the Conference. Co-sponsors of the meeting include the Asian MetaCentre for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis, UNFPA, and WHO. Outputs from the meeting will include an advocacy document of the key findings of the Conference for the Fifth Asia-Pacific Population Conference to be held at ESCAP, Bangkok around the end of the year 2002 and an edited volume of key papers covering methodological, substantive, and policy findings. Conference information, including the tentative programme, are available online at http://www.iussp.org/Bangkok2002/bangkok.php .
Committee and Working Group seminars and conferences
The IUSSP Committee on Anthropological Demography, in collaboration with Institut de Formation et de Recherche Démographique (IFORD) of the University of Yaounde II and the Faculty of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences of the University of Yaounde I, will hold a seminar "Macro-Meso-Micro Social Influences in Health: Changing Patterns of Morbidity and Mortality" in Yaoundé, Cameroon, 8 June, 2002. This seminar will focus attention on qualitative, local or case studies of the ways in which macro-meso-micro social changes may influence and are influencing changes in health status, morbidity, mortality, and health-seeking behaviour.
The IUSSP Committee on Emerging Health Threats will hold its first seminar, "Determinants of Diverging Trends in Mortality, on 19-21 June 2002 at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), Rostock, Germany. This seminar will be focused on emerging mortality trends and patterns. It will provide an opportunity for presenting the results of comprehensive analyses on particularly unfavourable and/or unexpected mortality phenomena and to re-visit, on this basis, the concept of mortality transition.
The IUSSP Committee on Longevity will organise a seminar "Prospects for survival, health and living conditions in old age: policy implications," tentatively scheduled to be held in New York in October. In addition to statistical issues of forecasting health and longevity, topics will include prospects of further decline in mortality and morbidity due to cardiovascular diseases and cancer, possibilities that future progress in the biology of ageing will delay senescent processes, emergence and re-emergence of infectious diseases (including AIDS) in the future, and potential effects of environmental and social factors on future survival.
The first seminar of the new IUSSP Committee on Reproductive Health, scheduled to be held in Gaborone, Botswana in October, aims to take stock of the condom in the era of HIV/AIDS. The seminar will be based around the four themes: condom use for pregnancy prevention, condom use for disease prevention, removing barriers to condom use, and intervention strategies or promoting condom use for disease prevention. Depending on the submissions received, there may also be a session devoted to case studies from Southern and Eastern Africa, with a special focus on Botswana.
The IUSSP Working Group on Forced Migration is planning to hold a seminar in late spring or early summer 2002 in Den Haag. The objective of the seminar is to produce papers on the state of the art in estimation procedures concerning victims of human rights violations used by "truth commissions" and in legal proceedings of tribunals related to war crimes and crimes against humanity. The workshop will further involve participants in truth commissions and tribunals as prosecutors and defence lawyers to discuss their use of and need for empirical data and levels of reliability in those and similar fora. The meeting is being co-organized by Charles Keely of Georgetown University and William Seltzer of Fordham University.
The IUSSP Working Group on Urbanisation has succeeded in obtaining an invitation from the Rockefeller Foundation to hold a seminar entitled "New forms of urbanisation: conceptualising and measuring human settlement in the 21st century" at the Foundation's Study and Conference Centre in Bellagio, Italy on 11-15 March, 2002. The principal objective is to formulate a new approach to studying urbanisation trends that takes account of the major changes in human settlement systems around the world, particularly, the blurring of the simple rural/urban dichotomy used traditionally for this purpose.
The Global Science Panel on Population and Environment will hold a meeting "Population and Sustainable Development" at IIASA Conference Centre, Laxenburg (Austria) on 21-23 March, 2002. This will be the major event of the Panel and all papers presented will be put on the Web to be later reviewed for a possible book publication. At the end of the conference the Panel members will meet for a discussion of the main findings and messages to be conveyed to the public. They will comment on a first draft for a 1page summary statement intended for wide circulation. This statement will be refined in April-May 2002 with a view towards dissemination in June-August 2002 and presentation of work and findings of the Panel at the Johannesburg Conference on Sustainable Development in September. The Population Environment Research Network will be closely involved in disseminating and encouraging comment on the output of the Global Science Panel.
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