POPULATION STUDIES
Our research provides a broad, interdisciplinary coverage of population research, and offers an up-to-date and solid basis of information on the policy implications of recent research relevant to the causes and consequences of changing population size and composition. The Center's demographic expertise using ethnographic methods, comparative-historical methods, discourse analysis, and others methods considers population-related work as very important issue to global trends. The Center's population scope includes demographic, economic, social, political, and health research.
POPULATION DYNAMICS
Among population researchers, demographers are concerned with the empirical study of population dynamics; that is, demographers study population determinants and consequences including size, composition, how populations change over time and the processes influencing those changes. Demographers deal with the collection, presentation, and analysis of data relating to the basic life-cycle events and experiences of people: birth, marriage, divorce, household and family formation, migration, employment, ageing, and death. They also examine compositions of populations by sex, age, race, ethnicity, occupation, education, religion, marital status, and living arrangements. Demographers further assess the distribution of populations by region, country, province or state, urban or rural area, and by neighborhood. Most demographic data come from population censuses, vital registration systems, national registers, and surveys. The Center regularly utilizes national census data for many of its operations.
MIGRATION: WHY PEOPLE MOVE
Most people move for economic reasons, but some migrate to escape political or religious persecution or simply to fulfil a personal desire for change. Some experts divide the many reasons people leave their homes for a new one into push and pull factors. Push factors might be widespread unemployment, lack of farmland, famine, or war in their home area. The Great Depression (1929–1939) is a good example of a push factor, as hard times encouraged more residents to leave the United States than move in. In the 1980s and 1990s, hundreds of thousands of Africans were pushed out of their homelands to neighboring countries because of famine and civil war. Factors that attract migrants are called pull factors. These include a booming economy, favorable immigration laws, or free agricultural land to which the migrant is moving. For example, the labour shortage in Japan is pulling record numbers of legal and illegal immigrants to fill the low-status, low-paying, or dangerous jobs Japanese natives reject. In order to keep a working population that can support Japan's elderly, it would need 17 million new immigrants by 2050, according to recent United Nations reporting. Other estimates have said Japan would need 400,000 new immigrants each year; however, the idea of increased immigration is not favorable to most Japanese.