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 essential source for scholarly reassessment of the Asia-Pacific region's diverse and significant archaeology and history. James P. Delgado, coauthor of The Maritime Landscape of the Isthmus of Panam� Underpins a nuanced picture of Asia-Pacific that shows how the activities of the Chinese and Japanese in East Asia, the spread of Islam from South Asia, and the efforts of the Iberians and especially the Spanish from southern Europe ushered in a world of complex interaction and rapid and often profound change in local, regional, and wider cultural patterns. Ian Lilley, editor of Archaeology of Oceania: Australia and the Pacific Islands The history of Asia-Pacific since 1500 has traditionally been told with Europe as the main player ushering in a globalized, capitalist world. But these volumes help decentralize that global history, revealing that preexisting trade networks and local authorities influenced the region before and long after Europeans arrived. In the volume The Southwest Pacific and Oceanian Regions, case studies from Alofi, Vanuatu, the Marianas, Hawai'i, Guam, and Taiwan compare the development of colonialism across different islands. Contributors discuss human settlement before the arrival of Dutch, French, British, and Spanish explorers, tracing major exchange routes that were active as early as the tenth century. They highlight rarely examined sixteenth- and seventeenth-century encounters between indigenous populations and Europeans and draw attention to how cross-cultural interaction impacted the local peoples of Oceania. The volume The Asia-Pacific Region looks at colonialism in the Philippines, China, Japan, and Vietnam, emphasizing the robust trans-regional networks that existed before European contact. Southeast Asia had long been influenced by Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim traders in ways that helped build the region's ethnic and political divisions. Essays show the complexity and significance of maritime trade during European colonization by investigating galleon wrecks in Manila, Japan's porcelain exports, and Spanish coins discovered off China's coast. Packed with archaeological and historical evidence from both land and underwater sites, impressive in geographical scope, and featuring perspectives of scholars from many different countries and traditions, these volumes illuminate the often misunderstood nature of early colonialism in Asia-Pacific.

The Asia-Pacific region has not only the greatest concentration of population but is, arguably, the future economic centre of the world. Epidemiological transition in the region is occurring much faster than it did in the West and many countries face the emerging problem of chronic diseases at the same time as they continue to grapple with communicable diseases. This book explores how disease patterns and health problems in Asia and the Pacific, and collective responses to them, have been shaped over time by cultural, economic, social, demographic, environmental and political factors. With fourteen chapters, each devoted to a country in the region, the authors take a comparative and historical approach to the evolution of public health and preventive medicine, and offer a broader understanding of the links in a globalizing world between health on the one hand and culture, economy, polity and society on the other. Public Health in Asia and the Pacific presents the importance of the non-medical context in the history of human disease, as well as the significance of disease in the larger histories of the region. It will appeal to scholars and policy makers in the fields of public health, the history of medicine, and those with a wider interest in the Asia-Pacific region.

‘This volume brings together a diversity of international scholars, unified in the theme of expanding scientific knowledge about humanity’s past in the Asia-Pacific region. The contents in total encompass a deep time range, concerning the origins and dispersals of anatomically modern humans, the lifestyles of Pleistocene and early Holocene Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, the emergence of Neolithic farming communities, and the development of Iron Age societies. These core enduring issues continue to be explored throughout the vast region covered here, accordingly with a richness of results as shown by the authors. Befitting of the grand scope of this volume, the individual contributions articulate perspectives from multiple study areas and lines of evidence. Many of the chapters showcase new primary field data from archaeological sites in Southeast Asia. Equally important, other chapters provide updated regional summaries of research in archaeology, linguistics, and human biology from East Asia through to the Western Pacific.’ Mike T. Carson Associate Professor of Archaeology Micronesian Area Research Center University of Guam

This book argues that Asia's population aging and stagnation needs to be viewed through a multi-dimensional lens, serving as a useful resource for government workers, stakeholders, and scholars in sociology, demography, geography, and economics.--Adapted from dust jacket.

Across the Asia Pacific, there are a vast range of experiences of homelessness and an equally diverse range of responses from state systems. Since understandings of homelessness are also heavily dependent on geographical, cultural, and historical contexts, attitudes towards it as a ‘social problem’ are essentially underpinned by ideological considerations. With a particular focus on critical and international policy and practice, this book builds upon the current scholarship of homelessness across the Asia Pacific. Through examining and comparing a range of state responses, it explores the differing definitions and lived experiences of the issue in a number of countries, including Japan, China, India, Korea, and Australia. The book analyses a range of key themes from welfare provision and legislation to the services provided and the roles played by non-governmental organisations, whilst also recognising the effects of class, gender and ethnicity on homelessness in the region. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Faces of Homelessness in the Asia Pacific will be useful to students and scholars of Social Policy, Urban Sociology, Psychology and Asian Studies.

Epidemiology is a subject of growing importance, as witnessed by its role in the description and prediction of the impact of new diseases such as AIDS and new-variant CJD. Epidemiology: Study Design and Data Analysis covers the whole spectrum of standard analytical techniques used in epidemiology, from descriptive techniques in report writing to model diagnostics from generalized linear models. The author discusses the advantages, disadvantages, and alternatives to case-control, cohort and intervention studies and details such crucial concepts as incidence, prevalence, confounding and interaction. Many exercises are provided, based on real epidemiological data sets collected from all over the world. The data sets are also available on an associated web site. Epidemiology: Study Design and Data Analysis will be an invaluable textbook for statistics and medical students studying epidemiology, and a standard reference for practicing epidemiologists.

The fifteen essays in this volume address from several viewpoints the question of what role population change played in East Asia's rapid economic development.