Academic literature on the topic 'Child (Economic) Dependency Ratio'

Indian society has been bound by culture and tradition since ancient times. The patriarchal system and the gender stereotypes in the family and society have always showed a preference for the male child. Sons were regarded as a means of social security and women remained under male domination. Due to her subordinated position, she has suffered years of discrimination, exploitation and subjugation. She became the victim of several evils like child marriage, sati, polygamy, Purdah system, female infanticide, forced pregnancy, rape etc. In such incidents/recorded cases surprisingly mother-in-law are also taking active part. This discrimination and violence against women had an effect on the sex ratio in India. The main causes of violence are unequal power-relations, gender discrimination, patriarchy, and economic dependence of women, dowry, low moral values, negative portrayal of women's image in media, no participation in decision-making, gender stereotypes and a negative mindset. In this study about 69.39% of the respondents were married and 4.91% respondents were widow, it is observed that 3.82% of respondents were divorcee. The rest of them 21.85% were unmarried. In this study 50.27% majority of the women need information on education information, followed by information on others respectively 25.68%, agriculture information 22.95%, employment information 15.30%, health care information 11.48%, loan and politics information 9.29%, food nutrition, entertainment information respectively 6.01%, the lowest 3.28% of the respondents needed information on religion. In this study 88% of respondents responded that they were highly satisfied with the source of information, where as 9% of respondents responded that they were partially satisfied, 2.73% of respondents said that the source of information are moderately satisfied.

This study examines the relationship between population aging and economic growth in a panel of 10 selected Middle East countries for the period of 1996–2016. For this purpose, this study uses two different measures of population aging, namely population aged 65 and over and old dependency ratio, to investigate their impacts on economic growth. The study utilizes the three alternative models of static panel data comprised of the pooled ordinary least squares, random effects, and fixed effects. The results of the robust fixed effects model indicate that the population aged 65 and over and the old dependency ratio have a positive effect on economic growth. The finding supports the argument indicating that an aging population does not necessarily adversely affect economic growth in the developing countries as it does in the developed countries. Therefore, the elderly population is not a matter of concern for the Middle East and the mechanisms through which the effect can take place are savings behavior and human capital accumulation of the individuals.

Gender equality and information and communication technology are important in the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in policy, planning, and practice. The 2000 Millennium Declaration of the United Nations (UN) formed an international agreement among member states to work toward the reduction of poverty and its effects by 2015 through eight Millennium Development Goals: 1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger 2. Achieve universal primary education 3. Promote gender equality and the empowerment of women 4. Reduce child and maternal mortality 5. Improve maternal health care 6. Combat HIV and AIDS, malaria, and other major diseases 7. Ensure environmental sustainability 8. Develop global partnership for development Progress toward gender equality and the empowerment of women is one goal that is important to achieving the others. Poverty, hunger, illiteracy, environmental threats, HIV and AIDS, and other health threats disproportionately affect the lives of women and their dependent children. Gender-sensitive ICT applications to education, health care, and local economies have helped communities progress toward the MDGs. ICT applications facilitate rural health-care workers’ access to medical expertise through phones and the Internet. Teachers expand learning resources through the Internet and satellite services, providing a greater knowledge base for learners. Small entrepreneurs with ICT access and training move their local business into world markets. ICT diffusion into world communication systems has been pervasive. Even some of the poorest economies in Africa show the fastest cell-phone growth, though Internet access and landline numbers are still low (International Telecommunications Union [ITU], 2003b). ICT access or a lack of it impacts participation, voice, and decision making in local, regional, and international communities. ICTs impact the systems that move or inhibit MDG progress. UN secretary general Kofi Annan explained the role of the MDGs in global affairs: Millennium Development Goals are too important to fail. For the international political system, they are the fulcrum on which development policy is based. For the billion-plus people living in extreme poverty, they represent the means to a productive life. For everyone on Earth, they are a linchpin to the quest for a more secure and peaceful world. (UN, 2005, p. 28) Annan also stressed the critical need for partnerships to facilitate technology training to enable information exchange and analysis (UN, 2005). ICT facilitates sharing lessons of success and failure, and progress evaluation of work in all the MDG target areas. Targets and indicators measuring progress were selected for all the MDGs. Gender equality and women’s empowerment are critical to the achievement of each other goal. Inadequate access to the basic human needs of clean water, food, education, health services, and environmental sustainability and the support of global partnership impacts great numbers of women. Therefore, the targets and indicators for Goal 3 address females in education, employment, and political participation. Progress toward the Goal 3 target to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and in all levels of education no later than 2015, will be measured by the following indicators. • Ratio of girls to boys in primary, secondary, and tertiary education • Ratio of literate females to males who are 15- to 24-year-olds • Share of women in wage employment in the nonagricultural sector • Proportion of seats held by women in national parliaments (World Bank, 2003) Education is positively related to improved maternal and infant health, economic empowerment, and political participation (United Nations Development Program [UNDP], 2004; World Bank, 2003). Education systems in developing countries are beginning to offer or seek ways to provide ICT training as a basic skill and knowledge base. Proactive policy for gender equality in ICT access has not always accompanied the unprecedented ICT growth trend. Many civil-society representatives to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) argue for ICT access to be considered a basic human right (Girard & Ó Soichrú, 2004; UN, 1948). ICT capability is considered a basic skill for education curriculum at tertiary, secondary, and even primary levels in developed regions. In developing regions, ICT access and capability are more limited but are still tightly woven into economic communication systems. ICTs minimize time and geography barriers. Two thirds of the world’s poor and illiterate are women (World Bank, 2003). Infant and maternal health are in chronic crisis for poor women. Where poverty is highest, HIV and AIDS are the largest and fastest growing health threat. Ninety-five percent of people living with HIV and AIDS are in developing countries, partly because of poor dissemination of information and medical treatment. Women are more vulnerable to infection than men. Culturally reinforced sexual practices have led to higher rates of HIV infection for women. Gender equality and the empowerment of women, starting with education, can help fight the spread of HIV, AIDS, and other major diseases. ICT can enhance health education through schools (World Bank). Some ICT developers, practitioners, and distributors have identified ways to incorporate gender inclusiveness into their policies and practice for problem-solving ICT applications toward each MDG target area. Yet ICT research, development, education, training, applications, and businesses remain male-dominated fields, with only the lesser skilled and salaried ICT labor force approaching gender equality. Successful integration of gender equality and ICT development policy has contributed to MDG progress through several projects in the developing regions. Notable examples are the South-African-based SchoolNet Africa and Bangladesh-based Grameen Bank Village Pay Phone. Both projects benefit from international public-private partnerships. These and similar models suggest the value and importance of linking gender equality and empowerment with global partnership for development, particularly in ICT. This article reports on developing efforts to coordinate the achievement of the MDGs with policy, plans, and practice for gender equality beyond the universal educational target, and with the expansion of ICT access and participation for women and men. The article examines the background and trends of MDG 3, to promote gender equality and the empowerment of women, with particular consideration of MDG 8, to develop global partnership for development, in ICT access and participation.

The objective of the chapter is to analyze the performance and constraints of selected occupation-related SHGs in India and examine the sustainability of SHGs providing microfinance on the basis of secondary data and primary data from Kendrapara district of Odisha, India. It is observed that majority of the SHG members are in young age group with low level of literacy, small and medium level of land holding, medium level of dependency ratio, forming experience, family encouragement, deferred gratification, risk willingness achievement motivation, and economic activities. The major variables that have contributed for enhancing the performance of SHGs are family encouragement, risk willingness, achievement motivation, extension participation, extension contact, and training programs. In order to enhance further motivation and build confidence, proper market linkage and training programs need to be established. Further, to ensure sustainable development of SHGs in future, federation of SHGs can be thought of by the implementing agency.

Access to education for all has been restricted due to the rigid socio-economic structures prevalent in different parts of the world. Almost every nation promotes equality in education for all in the age group of 6 to 14 years. Many international agencies and non-governmental organizations are working to improve the access to education in the developing and under-developed nations. Some of the nations have improved the child enrollment ratio, and some of the nations are lagging in spite of well-framed policies, legislative measures, and the involvement of non-governmental organizations. In this context, the chapter examines the influence of social structure on child educational attainment and its interaction from a social capital perspective. Finally, the study will provide suggestions and recommendations to the existing policies to overcome the socio-economic differences in child education from a global perspective.

China, like India, has experienced rapid demographic change in recent decades. Combined with the dramatic economic growth which started with the introduction of market-orientated economic reforms from the late 1970s, demographic change has had enormous impacts on Chinese society, marriage, family relations and family building. This paper starts with a general overview of the ‘planks’ of this demographic change: rising life expectancy and lowered fertility, the distorted child sex ratio, and migration and urbanisation. It then moves on to a discussion of some of the consequences of these changes focusing on marriage, the shortage of brides and marriage finance; the implications of lowered fertility for women; and population aging and its challenge to the intergenerational contract. Marriage migration is discussed both in the context of the shortage of brides, and as one of the changes especially affecting women.

The article deals with the problem of analysis of banking activity and modern methods of investment development of the bank based on pairs trading models. The essence of the pair trading method as one of the most popular and qualitative methods of investment paper quality analysis is disclosed. The basis of the pairing trading method is defined as the beta-neutral portfolio strategy, which consists of creating a portfolio with a beta coefficient equal to zero, and the main advantage of which is the complete independence of the final paper yield from the market yield, it is only dependent on the future ratio of the value of one security to another. For the successful introduction of this method in banking activity, a clear algorithm for the construction of a paired trading model based on economic-mathematical methods and models is proposed. The proposed algorithm contains three stages in which the following steps are to be taken: analysis and selection of securities; development of a pairing trading model; development and regulation of the selected strategy. The implementation of the proposed algorithm begins with the selection of statistical data on the prices of securities, provides for the verification of data on stationarity, as well as the identification of a system for combining series, and the analysis of coefficients of the matching between prices of securities. As a result of the steps taken, pairs of securities are selected that are more closely related and a full economic analysis of the pairs is made, and the parameters of co-integration equations to pairs of paper are selected, evaluated and analyzed then the errors of the co-integration model are checked for stationary. In the work models of pairs trading are constructed for the realization of an aggressive strategy of trade spreads. In order to build an effective strategy for pairing trading, data on prices of securities, which are the most attractive to Ukrainian banks, namely, US Treasury bonds, have been examined. The hypothesis being tested in the paper is that it is necessary to identify a pair of securities with a sufficiently strong dependency where one should have a rapid growth or decline relative to the other, after which the sale of the revalued security and the purchase of the undervalued security is mandatory. The study found that for each pair of Treasury bonds, the ratio was satisfactory. This indicates that the resultant securities pairs are suitable as an investment that, with a well-designed strategy, will allow the bank to obtain optimum returns. The final step of the algorithm is the analysis of the results obtained, which includes a comprehensive analysis of the conducted research and effective decision-making. The application of the proposed algorithm will allow banks to make informed decisions on the choice and regulation of the strategy in exchange market changes in order to obtain a low level of risk and a high level of profit.

The common view in the economics theory relating to the fact that economic freedom will raise labor productivity and it will provide effective use of scarce resources becomes a current issue with the increase in the number of papers investigating the effect of economic freedom on economic growth. One of the main reasons of the increasing number of those papers is that economic freedom can be measured quantitatively (numerically) through the indexes calculated by various institutions. In this paper, the relationship between economic freedoms and economic growth for some emerging market economies is investigated. In estimating of the relationship between economic freedoms and economic growth, overall economic freedom index, property right index, business freedom index, trade freedom index and investment freedom index, which was created by the Heritage Foundation was used. Investment/GDP ratio and population dependency ratio are also control variables in the model. In the paper, in which panel fixed effect model was used, property right index, investment freedom index and population dependency ratio affect economic growth negatively, but business freedom index, trade freedom index and investment/GDP ratio affect economic growth positively. It isn’t found that there is a significantly relationship between overall economic freedom index and economic growth.

The effects of global and economical crisis on Turkey and Eurasian countries depend strongly on countries’ dependence ratio of foreign trade, on integrations and economic structure. Real economic growth of Russian and Belarus economies is affected by Euro and US-dollar rate of exchange (RoE), Kazakhstan’s economy by Euro RoE, Turkmenistan’s by Euro exchange and interest and Turkish economy by Euro RoE and consumer price index (CPI). The effect of public borrowings ratio on gross domestic product is affected in Russian economy by Euro RoE, CPI and interests 1 and 2, in Kazakhstan economy by US dollar RoE and interest, in Belarus economy by US dollar RoE, interest and CPI, in Turkmenistan’s by Euro RoE and interest and Turkish economy by interest and CPI. Russia must regulate improving economy politics in Euro exchange, interest and CPI indicators to increase real economical growth and decrease ratio of public borrowings on gross domestic product. Kazakhstan must focus on Euro RoE, US dollar RoE, interest and CPI indicators. The same situation is valid for Belarus. Turkmenistan must give importance to Euro exchange and interests in its politics of economy. Turkey must take Euro exchange, CPI and interests into consideration. Thereby real economy growth will increase and ratio of public borrowings on gross domestic product will decrease. To decrease shocks against fragility, to develop global competition strength and decrease of foreign-source dependency, Turkey and Eurasian countries must develop new strategies and constitute and develop economy politics for global competition capacity.

The term “middle income trap” was firstly used in the World Bank’s Report titled “An East Asian Renaissance Ideas for Economic Growth” (2007), which then swiftly gained wide currency. According to this report, some countries that failed to align themselves with the requirements of changes and diversification of 21st century would remain in their respective income bracket. As long as the labor force of a given middle income country is not gradually transferred from the agriculture sector operating with low levels of productivity into the manufacturing sector which produces high added value products thanks to innovation-based practices, it will be losing its competitive edge as compared advanced countries, leading it to reach a plateau at its given level of income. This study is dedicated to determining whether or not Turkey do suffer from middle income trap, and examining the factors responsible for such trap, if they do so. This study also analyzes the primary causes behind middle income trap by utilizing both social and economic data these countries such as real GDP, inflation, good and services export to GDP, agriculture sector to GDP, Gini coefficient and age dependency ratio utilizing Vector Error Correction Model.

This rapid review synthesises the literature from academic, policy, and knowledge institution sources on how demography affects labour markets (e.g. entrants, including youth and women) and labour market outcomes (e.g. capital-per-worker, life-cycle labour supply, human capital investments) in the context of sub-Saharan Africa. One of the key findings is that the fast-growing population in sub-Saharan Africa is likely to affect the ability to get productive jobs and in turn economic growth. This normally happens when workers move from traditional (low productivity agriculture and household businesses) sectors into higher productivity sectors in manufacturing and services. In theory the literature shows that lower dependency ratios (share of the non-working age population) should increase output per capita if labour force participation rates among the working age population remain unchanged. If output per worker stays constant, then a decline in dependency ratio would lead to a rise in income per capita. Macro simulation models for sub-Saharan Africa estimate that capital per worker will remain low due to consistently low savings for at least the next decades, even in the low fertility scenario. Sub-Saharan African countries seem too poor for a quick rise in savings. As such, it is unlikely that a lower dependency ratio will initiate a dramatic increase in labour productivity. The literature notes the gender implications on labour markets. Most women combine unpaid care for children with informal and low productive work in agriculture or family enterprises. Large family sizes reduce their productive labour years significantly, estimated at a reduction of 1.9 years of productive participation per woman for each child, that complicates their move into more productive work (if available). If the transition from high fertility to low fertility is permanent and can be established in a relatively short-term period, there are long-run effects on female labour participation, and the gains in income per capita will be permanent. As such from the literature it is clear that the effect of higher female wages on female labour participation works to a large extent through reductions in fertility.

The population in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is aging rapidly, as the proportion of people aged 60 and above is expected to increase to 35% by 2050. While aging poses economic challenges, if managed well, it can generate new employment opportunities with the emergence of new professions related to elderly care. However, capturing these benefits require labor market reforms, higher public spending to finance long-term care and pensions, and policy support. This note presents policy recommendations to address identified socioeconomic implications of rapid population aging in the PRC, focusing on labor market changes, effective long-term elderly care, and measures to address the increasing old-age dependency ratio.