This Handbook offers a comprehensive collection of essays that cover essential features of geographical mobility, from internal migration, to international migration, to urbanization, to the adaptation of migrants in their destinations. Part I of the collection introduces the range of theoretical perspectives offered by several social science disciplines, while also examining the crucial relationship between internal and international migration. Part II takes up methods, ranging from how migration data are best collected to contemporary techniques for analyzing such data. Part III of the handbook contains summaries of present trends across all world regions. Part IV rounds out the volume with several contributions assessing pressing issues in contemporary policy areas. The volume’s editor Michael J. White has spent a career studying the pattern and process of internal and international migration, urbanization and population distribution in a wide variety of settings, from developing societies to advanced economies. In this Handbook he brings together contributors from all parts of the world, gathering in this one volume both geographical and substantive expertise of the first rank. The Handbook will be a key reference source for established scholars, as well as an invaluable high-level introduction to the most relevant topics in the field for emerging scholars.

Dr. Albert Schmid President of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees According to the United Nations, about 200 million people of the estimated world population of 6.8 billion are international migrants – that corresponds to about three per cent of the total world population. The proportion of international migrants in the global population has increased only marginally in the last 40 years. But, as a result of global population growth, the absolute number of migrants has increased, and their structure and spatial distribution has changed considerably. A structural shift has taken place primarily in the industrialised countries, where less than 20 per cent of the global workers are now living, but where more than 60 per cent of all migrants worldwide reside. Since 1990, more than 16 million people have moved to Germany, while about 11 million have left the country in the same period. Altogether, 15 million people of international migration origin are living in Germany, comprising almost 19 per cent of Germany’s current population of 82 million. At the end of 2006, about 64 million people out of Europe’s population of 732 million, or nine per cent, lived in a European country they were not born in. But why does anybody migrate at all? People decide to leave because, in general, they expect to find better conditions and opportunities in other countries or regions.

Identifies the major weaknesses in the current United Nations system and proposes fundamental reforms to address each. This title is also available as Open Access.

This overview includes chapters on child mortality, adult mortality, fertility, proximate determinants, marriage, internal migration, international migration, and the demographic impact of AIDS.

This volume brings together a range of contributions that provide contemporary regional science perspectives on population change and its socio-economic consequences in the Asia-Pacific region. This region accounts for close to two-thirds of the world’s population and is highly diverse in terms of key demographic indicators such as population size, growth, composition and distribution. The authors provide quantitative assessments, either descriptively or by means of modelling, of important demographic issues affecting this part of the world. The topics addressed include: broad demographic trends across the Asia-Pacific region and its sub-regions; assessment of population decline, urbanization and spatial distribution using cases from China, Colombia, Japan and Australia; migration and economic impacts in Australasia, Chile and Timor Leste; and the impacts of declining or low fertility and population ageing in China, India, Thailand, and across Asia. Given its scope, the book will appeal to all readers seeking to understand population change and impacts across the Asia-Pacific region, with a specific focus on sub-regional differences and dynamics.

The first text that specifically links both international and internal migration with development at a global level. The world is divided into a series of functionally integrated development zones which are identified, not simply on the basis of their level of development, but also through their spatial patterns and historical experience of migration. Migration and Development stresses the importance of migration in discussing regional, rather than simply country, differences. These variations in mobility are placed within the context of a global hierarchy, although regional, national and local cultural and social conditions are certainly not ignored in this wide-ranging work.