March 25, 2014 | Defo News

Living apart together

The new issue (Nr. 1/2014) of "Demografische Forschung Aus Erster Hand", the popular science newsletter with latest research results from demography, has been released. (The Newsletter is available in German only.)

Topics of the 1/2014 issue:

Living apart together
More and more couples are living separately, often at long distance. But love at distance does not necessarily damage the relationship.

Often the job can be blamed for the supposed misery. But other couples make a conscious decision to live apart together. Jürgen Dorbritz and Robert Naderi of the Federal Institute of Population Research have looked at the stability of such bi-local partnerships. Most notably,  it has emerged that these partnerships are more stable than commonly assumed.

Gap continues to widen
People living in Western Belarus and in cities live longer than their counterparts in the eastern part of the country.

After the fall of the USSR, the mortality rate rose in all former Soviet socialist republics.
A team of MPIDR researchers around Pavel Grigoriev has now looked at the shape of the situation in Belarus, among other things identifying reasons behind the growing gap between the two regions. It is above all alcohol, unemployment, and poverty that lead to rising mortality in the East.

Different countries, different effects
The success of family policies depends primarily on the social structure of a society.

Since decades many western countries have been struggling with falling birth rates. Their governments have a growing interest to effectively combat the causes behind. The demographer Thomas Fent of the Vienna Institute of Demography together with colleagues has done a computer simulation analysis on how the success of family policy depends on the social peculiarities of the population.

"Demografische Forschung Aus Erster Hand" is a joint publication of the Max Planck Institute for demographic Research (MPIDR), the Rostocker Zentrum zur Erforschung des Demografischen Wandels (RZ), the Vienna Institute of Demography (VID), the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital and the Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB). The newsletter is released four times a year and is available electronically and as a printed version and is free of charge.

All past issues are available online on the Newsletter website. On the website you also have the possibility to subscribe to the Newsletter to get informed about the release of the new issues or to receive the printed versions by mail.