JOURNAL OF POPULATION ASSOCIATION OF IRAN
Year:2009 | Volume:4 | Issue:7|Papers Count:9

Among the three well-known seismic belts of the world, ESCAP is the most hazardous region which includes Iran. Besides earthquakes, natural disasters such as floods, droughts, and landslides take the lives of thousands annually in the region and displace hundreds of thousand people. In Iran, only in the last two decades two major earthquakes have occurred with hundreds of thousand casualties. Before final stages of reconstruction operations in Manjil and Roudbar quake-ridden areas, another earthquake occurred in Bam district which entirely devastated Bam city and left enormous human and financial damages in more than 20 villages. The research project "Crisis management and socioeconomic consequences of Bam earthquake for rural disaster areas" included a study of demographic consequences with sample size of 300 rural households. An analysis of macro and micro data showed a significant difference in fertility, migration, mortality, employment, forms of marriage, and income levels. Comparative analyses illustrated a positive natural and absolute growth of population, increased migrations, incremental trend of fertility, changes in sex ratios, exogamous marriages, heterogamy, and differences in economic, subsistence, and income-generating activity indices, in comparison to the pre-disaster period. A dynamic comparison between demographic processes and previous long-term trends shows a biased order.

This study investigated marriage patterns among religious and ethnic groups in Ghorveh district using the characteristics assimilation and norms-cultural hypotheses in explaining difference in marriage patterns. The data source for this study is the 2008 survey conducted among married women aged 15-49 years in rural and urban areas of the district using a structured questionnaire. The results showed that the age of marriage and free mate selection has increased while the proportion of consanguineous marriage has decreased slightly across time for marriage cohorts among religious and ethnic groups. Nevertheless, the results indicated that significant differences exists in marriage patterns among religious and ethnic groups as Kurds and Sunni women have had higher proportions of early marriage, arranged marriage and consanguineous marriage as compared with their counterparts. Furthermore, multivariate analysis revealed that although by controlling for socio-economic characteristics, the religious and ethnic differences in marriage patterns did not disappear and remained significant in the models, these differences decreased significantly. In brief, the results of this study support the characteristics assimilation hypothesis.

This paper aims to study the challenges and the opportunities due to the demographic transition emphasizing on Iran's past and the probable future experiences. The first demographic transition that concurrently accompany with modernization and development processes, create some challenges such as increasingly high population growth rate and expansion of population size, young age structure and increase in the population at work ages.The second demographic transition begins when societies enter post-modernization stage. The most important challenges of second demographic transition include the below replacement fertility, reduction of population at work age, population ageing and the probable negative growth rate of population.Of course, regarding particular conditions of societies, the pace of changes maybe quite different. Iran has experienced the challenges of the first demographic transition during the past half a century. If approach of tendentious regularity of social changes is implicitly accepted, we should expect the challenges of the second demographic transition in Iran at the forthcoming decades. Population planning and proper population policies can give a smooth path to the future challenges of the second demographic transition in Iran.

In the past few decades, a large number of Iranians have chosen to find new places of residence in foreign countries. This Iranian diaspora includes a significant number of highly-skilled workers, entrepreneurs, and owners of capital. These skills, capabilities, and capital assets have either been transferred directly from Iran as a result of migration or have been created indirectly in the host countries with the support of domestic Iranian financial and intellectual sources. Furthermore, the demand for migration has not subsided in Iran. Yet, whereas the migration of highly-qualified labor force continues to be significant, the surplus Iranian labor force with medium level of qualifications is not able to secure productive jobs abroad. The purpose of this article is to examine various important aspects of significant migration propensity observed among Iranians with an emphasis on the highly-skilled as well as semi-skilled labor force. Furthermore, in this article, government efforts placed on expatriate reconnection and dispatch of surplus labor to foreign countries are described. Some observations on the main migration causes of the highly-skilled labor force and obstacles to the migration of the semi-skilled labor force as well as a set of recommendations for the short-term are also offered in the article.

Iran is a large country with different geographical climates, subcultures, varying socio-demographic structure and different employment and development policies in each region. Therefore, it is more likely not to expect a same rate of unemployment, which is a dependent variable of socio-cultural factors and governmental policies, in various regions of the country. In fact, the aim of this article is to present the results of a survey conducted on the issue of unemployment in all provinces of the country and consequently to reach a reasonable classification according to their unemployment rate and subsequently to assess the major effective factors, with a detailed look among different parts of the country. The method used in this project was secondary analysis, using the 1358 census data. In order to achieve this goal, SPSS software (verjon 18) was applied to calculate statistical clustering, analysis of variance (ANOYA) and Pearson coefficient. The results show that unemployment rate varies drastically amongst different provinces. High economic cooperation rate is positively correlated with employment rate of young population.

This paper presents the age structure of economically active women and the distribution of them among economic activities in Iran based on 1996 and 2006 censuses. It also estimates the economic role of women in urban households using Urban Household Income and Expenditure survey (2006). The results show that there is a dramatic difference between women and men unemployment rates in both years. Through the decade, the crude rate of unemployment and the general rate of unemployment have increased in both urban and rural area, of the country. These rates are more for rural men and women labors rather than urban labors. Moreover, both years experienced a higher age specific activity of men in comparison with women in all age groups. The frequency of the employed women in private sector was more than public sector in those years. The results of estimating the economic role of women in urban households indicate that women have an important unobservable economic role in households. Generally, the share of processed foods in total food expenditure was substantially less for women than men.

This article is based on a survey undertaken in the city of Tehran in the year 2009. The sample size was 500. Thus, in order to conduct the survey 500 questioners were distributed and filled-out by married women whose husbands were working on public sector and governmental jobs. The results indicate that to be covered with health insurance through husband reduces the attitude of married women towards employment substantially. Other factors such as age, education of spouses, husband's income and the number of children, also, affects the married women's employment, specially their attitude towards full-time jobs.