There is long-standing debate on how population growth affects national economies. A new report from Population Matters examines the history of this debate and synthesizes current research on the topic. The authors, led by Harvard economist David Bloom, conclude that population age structure, more than size or growth per se, affects economic development, and that reducing high fertility can create opportunities for economic growth if the right kinds of educational, health, and labor-market policies are in place. The report also examines specific regions of the world and how their differing policy environments have affected the relationship between population change and economic development.

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Andrei Rogers, one of the world's leading authorities on population trends, offers a powerful technique for carrying out regional population projections. He gives a clear step-by-step analysis and demonstrations of actual projections of future populations at the regional level. The examples show how to calculate regional population growth rates, age compositions, and spatial distributions using data from several developed and less developed countries.

Various approaches have been developed to evaluate the consequences of spatial structure on evolution in subdivided populations. This book is both a review and new synthesis of several of these approaches, based on the theory of spatial genetic structure. François Rousset examines Sewall Wright's methods of analysis based on F-statistics, effective size, and diffusion approximation; coalescent arguments; William Hamilton's inclusive fitness theory; and approaches rooted in game theory and adaptive dynamics. Setting these in a framework that reveals their common features, he demonstrates how efficient tools developed within one approach can be applied to the others. Rousset not only revisits classical models but also presents new analyses of more recent topics, such as effective size in metapopulations. The book, most of which does not require fluency in advanced mathematics, includes a self-contained exposition of less easily accessible results. It is intended for advanced graduate students and researchers in evolutionary ecology and population genetics, and will also interest applied mathematicians working in probability theory as well as statisticians.