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Sweden has one of the world's most eminent and exhaustive records of statistical information on its population. As early as the eighteenth century, ethnic notations were being made in parish registers throughout the country, and by the early nineteenth century a specific category for the Sami population had been added to the forms used to collect data for the Tabellverket (National Population Statistics). Beginning in 1860, the Sami were also counted in the first official census of the Swedish state. Nonetheless--and in contrast to many other countries--Sweden today lacks separate statistical information not only about its sole recognized indigenous population but also about other ethnic groups. The present paper investigates Sweden's attempts to enumerate its indigenous Sami population prior to World War II and the cessation of ethnic enumeration after the war. How have the Sami been identified and enumerated? How have statistical categories been constructed, and how have they changed over time? The aim of this essay is not to assess the validity of the demographic sources. Instead the paper will explore the historical, social, and cultural factors that have had a bearing on how a dominant administrative structure has dealt with the statistical construct of an indigenous population.

Between 1880 and 2000, the percentage of married men 60 and older living only with their wives in empty nest households rose from 19 percent to 78 percent. Data drawn from the US census show that more than half of this transformation occurred in the 30-year period from 1940 to 1970, bookended by moderate increases between 1880 and 1940 and very modest increases after 1970. Two literatures have presented demographic, cultural, and economic explanations for the decline in elderly co-residence with their children, but none adequately accounts for a sharp change in the mid-twentieth century. Both aggregate comparisons and multivariate analysis of factors influencing the living arrangements of elderly men suggest that economic advances for all age groups in the critical 30-year period, along with trends in fertility and immigration, best explain the three-stage shift that made the empty nest the dominant household form for older men by the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Between 1960 and 2000, fertility fell sharply in Brazil, but this transition was unevenly distributed in space and time. Using Bayesian spatial statistical methods and microdata from five censuses, we develop and apply a procedure for fitting logistic curves to the fertility transitions in more than 500 small regions of Brazil over this 40-year period. Doing so enables us to map the main features of the Brazilian fertility transition in considerable detail. We detect early declines in some regions of the country and document large differences between early and late transitions in regard to both the initial level of fertility and the speed of the transition. We also use our results to test hypotheses regarding changes in the level of development at the onset of the fertility transition and identify a temporary stall in the Brazilian transition that occurred in the late 1990s. A web site with project details is at http://schmert.net/BayesLogistic.

In this study, migration data compiled by the Internal Revenue Serve (IRS) and the US Census Bureau for 2006-07 were used to analyse internal migration patterns using migration and income effectiveness for the counties containing the 25 most populous cities in the United States. The results indicated that both large metropolitan and rural counties have lost population and income due to migration. Small metropolitan and non-metropolitan counties closer to cities gained population and income. Counties in South Florida attracted a large number of higher-income migrants from the largest cities in the US. In the last 13 years, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, the three most populous cities in the US, had negative migration effectiveness. Suburban areas and second-tier cities continued to attract people from large metropolitan areas.

This research on the basic demographic processes and marital migrations of the population on Ugljan Island in the period from 1857 to 2001 was conducted within the context of the long-term anthropological research of the population structure of Croatia's islands. The analysis was based on the study of the origin of 5 244 married couples from Preko, Kali, Kukljica, Lukoran and Ugljan and carried out using data preserved in the old Registers of Marriages. The results show a high level of endogamy and reproductive isolation of the population in all the villages and they also confirm the importance of using historical and demographic sources for researching the shaping of population structures.

This article explores the demographic subjects which were topical 25 years ago and compares them with those of current interest, as reflected not only by the articles published in the early, and most recent issues of Population Trends, but also by papers of the period in other demographic journals.