Gustavo De Santis – författare

The increasing gap between developed and developing world will be one of the most important themes of the 21st century. The contributions contained in this volume take a multidisciplinary approach to the problem, offering a comprehensive review of the theoretical issues and empirical findings that relate to the complex and multidirectional link between poverty and demographic behaviours and outcomes in the contemporary developing world. The starting point of the volume is an exact definition of poverty. The contributors go on to analyse in the detail its causes and effects, both at the micro and macro level, concentrating on those factors and consequences which relate more directly to the demographic sphere. Population growth, household structure and labour, fertility, AIDS, urbanization, migration, and mortality are amongst the areas covered, with the major themes discussed and elaborated in an introductory overview chapter.

This book touches upon a few of the major challenges that all modern societies will have to face in the near future: how to set up a resilient pay-as-you-go pension system; whether the current balance between expenses and revenues in social expenditure is viable in the future, and, if not, what changes need to be introduced; whether the relative well-being of the current and future cohorts of the old will be preserved, and how their standards of living compare to those experienced by the old in the recent past.At the micro level, the exchanges between generations are presented and discussed in detail: how they have evolved in the recent past in terms of time, money, co-residence and proximity, and what will likely happen next. The geographical scope is on the developed countries, plus South Korea.A rich documentation of tables and graphs supports the scientific analyses and the policy implications in each of the nine chapters of this book, where demography, sociology, and economics intersect fruitfully, both at the macro and at the micro level.