C. E. Bradatan

Although climate change slowly emerges in the academic, media and political debates as an important social issue it might be too slow for something to change significantly before it is too late. As such, it is probably a good time for social scientists to get more involved in understanding and explaining how this entirely human affair can be tackled and how it will affect our lives. The three books reviewed here, The Politics of Climate Change by Anthony Giddens, Climate Change and Society by John Urry, Migration and Climate Change edited by Etienne Piguet, Antoine Pecaud and Paul de Guchteneire, focus all on this topic, albeit from different perspectives.

This chapter aims to extend the stable population model by analyzing emigration from a below replacement fertility population. After presenting the mathematical model of a stable population with constant age-specific rates of emigration, I apply this model to a population with below replacement fertility, Romania and its emigration to Spain. The dependency ratios as well as the number in the staying and emigrant population are calculated at two future points in time (100 and 150 years). The analysis finds two rather unexpected results: 1) constant age-specific emigration rates slightly improve the dependency ratio of the aging sending population, and 2) the difference in size between the population with and without emigration is rather small.

This paper focuses on the specific issues of how highly skilled migrants encounter risks and the hedging mechanisms they employ when confronted with unfriendly policies or economic downturns in a host country. The paper also serves as an introduction to a special issue of Population Space and Place dedicated to understanding how highly skilled migration responded in different national contexts to the first great global economic recession of the twenty-first century. Although the individual papers do not necessarily employ a comparative perspective, these topics are explored in four different settings (UK, United States, Israel, and Canada), allowing readers to see how the history and characteristics of the host country influence the issues facing skilled migrants

Abstract.  There is a tendency in the media to portray immigrants as a group of poor, low skilled people with little knowledge of the receiving country's language or customs. While this general image might increase the natives’ awareness of the plight and problems of immigrants, it also leads to fear that immigrants profit from the financial resources of a country rather than contributing to the general wellbeing of the  host society. One problem with this narrative is that it leaves aside an important part of the immigrant group, namely the highly skilled, a group that hardly can be described as using the resources rather than contributing to the welfare of the receiving country. In this chapter, we analyze the effects the 2008 economic crisis had on a subgroup of the highly skilled immigrants, namely Latin Americans in the United States and Spain. The general question that we want to answer is: what happens with this specific group of foreign born, with high human capital, during times of economic downturn? How affected are their unemployment and labor force participation rates by the Great Recession? Does the recession lead to marginalization or further marginalization of these immigrants? This paper is divided into three parts. In the first part, we introduce the topic and review the literature, focusing on the two dimensions of interest: human capital and context of reception. We use Iredale’s (2001) definition of high-skilled immigrants as those having at least a bachelor degree The second part presents and discusses the data on the labor force characteristics in the US and Spain and the third part includes the conclusion.

East European migration became a significant feature in the post 1990 Europe. Although migration based on family connections is the most frequently used form of legal entry into the European Union, and family structure influences (and it is influenced by) migration, in the European literature more attention has been paid to individual (labour) migration rather than family migration. This paper intends to be a re-view of studies on family migration from Romania. Through this study, ‘family migration’ is used to understand not only the migration of the whole family unit but also migration of individuals within the context of family.

A restrictive population policy led to almost doubling the number of newborns from one year to another in Romania in the 1960s. Twenty years later, this large generation (of women) enters a marriage market with few eligible older mates, in a society where marriage is a must. In this paper I analyze this social experiment within the broader frame of the marriage squeeze/ two sex models. Using various data from censuses and surveys, I argue that the marriage market is flexible even when is confronted with disproportionately large cohorts. If the social pressure toward marriage is strong, the marriage rates do not necessarily fall, but the mating age patterns change.

In this paper, we analyze the patterns of first union formation of various cohorts in Hungary using competing risk models (Cox regression)  applied to retrospective data (women sub sample, N=8931) from the Gender and Generations Survey for Hungary, wave 1 (Turning points of the life course, 2001). Our results show that, while there is a well defined tendency of the younger generations to choose cohabitation rather than marriage as a first union, the level of education, family history and ethnicity play an important role in taking this decision. We found that cohabitation is a replacement for marriage only for more mature women, while those who enter into cohabitation at young ages use it as a step toward marriage.

"Why does Eastern Europe have the lowest fertility in the world? Most explanations focus on the consequences of upheaval in that region during the 1990s. These so called “transition” explanations miss a major part of the story. For the Romanian case, we show that the decline in fertility over the 1990s represents the continuation of a longstanding trend that was only interrupted by the extremely efficient pro-natalist policies inaugurated in the 1960s. We conclude that the conventional transition explanations of the 1990s fertility decline in Eastern Europe are incomplete
because they fail to give due weight to the effect of population policies.

Keywords: Eastern Europe; population policy; Romania; fertility decline; abortion; history""

In this paper I compare the suicide theories advanced by two 19th century thinkers, Masaryk and Durkheim, and test their conclusions using data from an East European country, Romania, before and after the 1989 fall of communism. Using data from various sources (Censuses, vital statistical publications, European databases), I follow two main directions in my discussion: a) differences and similarities between the two theories of suicide and b) what can still be used from these theories to explain the suicide as a social phenomenon.

Key words: suicide, Masaryk, Durkheim, Eastern Europe, minorities"""

During the last decade or so, the existence of a Balkan cultural identity has been hotly debated in books, articles, conferences, and other scholarly practices. It has been argued that the cuisine, supposedly common throughout the Balkan Peninsula, might be a form through which this cultural identity manifests itself. Using statistical data regarding the diet components over the last 20 years, this paper attempts to evaluate how valid the notion of a common Balkan cuisine is. There are two hypotheses I am trying to test: 1) there is a commonly shared diet structure in Balkan area, and 2) people consume similar quantities of basic food. Although these hypotheses are considerably weaker than that of the existence of a “Balkan cuisine”, it seems to me that they are the means of doing the most of the available data. The conclusions will point to the fact that, if “Balkan cuisine” means what people eat in this region on a daily basis, then there is a very limited specificity and coherence of food consumption in Balkan countries.

This study focuses on the patterns of ageing in rural Romania and Bulgaria, offering a holistic view of vulnerabilities, including persistent rural disadvantages, ageing in the countryside and the post-socialist transformation. Aggregate statistics and community case studies reveal the links between demographic processes and community development. This paper contributes to the country-specific analysis of the ageing European periphery in the context of social cohesion as a fundamental European goal.

Throughout the past years, substantial discussions have dealt with the factors associated with ethnic conflicts such as institutional designs, group dynamics and the influence of external peacemakers.
However, one area remains largely uncovered: this is how the domestic politics of a nation state shape minority issues from the same ethnicity in another country. In this paper we discuss the dynamics of Hungarian politics relative to the Hungarian minority in Romania, and identify factors that resulted in exporting domestic political contention to another country.

The marriage market is the pool of potential marriage partners available at a certain point in time. While attitudes toward marriage are the most important component that affects marriage rates, the demographic composition of the marriage market is also an important factor. Historically, the concept of the marriage market has been discussed only in terms of unions between a man and a woman, but recent research is also focusing on same-sex marriages.