Whatever floats your boat

This feels like a prisoner exchange in any action movie.

But like (almost) everything I do, I figure that demographics are important for analysis.

The largest applicants for asylum in Australia are the Chinese, followed by the (former) citizens of Afghanistan and Sri Lanka.

Makes you wonder if these asylum seekers knew that they would cause that much controversy - which would lead to more bureaucratic red-tape - they would pick another country to go to.

P/s: The United States (256,710) and France (185,850)  are apparently the top picks for the refugees, and the applicants for those countries vastly outnumber that of those applying to Australia. Hmm, must be some geographical reasoning for these type of flows..is there a possible gravity model study for this type of things?

P/P/s: But apparently the most accomodative people are the Swedes, who now live with 3 refugees for every 1000 people.

Putting age in marriage

A lot of media coverage on the royal wedding this week.

It's only right that I do something related, like the economist.

Catherine Elizabeth Middleton is 29 years old, while Prince William, Duke of Edinburgh is 28.

Demographics and development can sometimes be tricky things to resolve together.
... and I'm (really, really) not one to speculate what's the optimal marriage age yet though.

So I'll leave the analysis to anyone else who cares.

P/s: I must confess when i first saw that stat for Chinese, I initially thought it was current data....go figure.

People's development

Before reading into the following figure, it's important to understand the Total Fertility Rate (TFR), which is the average number of children a woman would have over her lifetime. The x-axis cuts at 2.1 to signify the replacement level of the TFR (i.e. 2.1 kids to replace a mom and a dad), the 0.1 addition is to quantify the infant mortality rates of a country.

I love studying population trends.

Its one aspect of economic development that's actually beyond policy control (besides child abortion and contraceptives) - unless you're Singapore or China.

Population is generally a good thing for development, as it represents additional labour and inherent consumption in the economy. An economic paradox  states that women in richer economies tend to have fewer children (but then again have a read on the many, many reasons why this situation may happen), and Malaysia is no different it seems. I'm not going to get into the discussion of what causes what just yet.

That said, I think the Sabah TFR stats may need revising.

...and the Department of Stats website seems to have changed...for the better! Go have a look.



Home-o-pathy

**Figure above excludes non-OECD economies, most obviously Singapore***

This obviously continues from the previous post.
Every country has emigrants, so lets not make a fuss about it.

Just wanted to say I think I can hear my Uni-mates making coming home plans over the next couple of years just for that new tax rule *grr!*.

Oh yeah, interestingly, Malaysians do not like to emigrate to Eastern Europe or Scandinavia... go figure.

If the bright lights don't deceive you...

Everyone in KL complains about the traffic jams, but really there's a good reason why there are tons of cars on the roads... people can actually afford them.

Urban economics (a branch of spatial economics) tends to be a touchy subject, because people like to believe that there should be less people in the same vicinity as them. But the importance of urban agglomeration for economic development should not be discounted as economies of scale of production (as in, individual productivity) usually increases when people interact more with each other. 

Followers of Thomas Malthus: I still like to think people are the answer and not the problem.