Demography and the Making of the Modern World: Public Policies and Demographic Forces

John Rennie Short critically explores the implications of demographic change from a social and economic perspective and considers what this means for public policy. He shows how events as varied and important as the Arab Spring, migration from Africa to Europe, budget negotiations in the United States, and economic growth in India and Brazil - all seemingly diverse issues from around the world - are shaped by forces of demography.

Using the demographic transition model as a framework, the book examines the demographic forces that underlie major social and economic issues, and in particular, the range of public policies that have been developed, adopted and rejected to meet these population challenges. The book outlines the varied impacts of these demographic changes on society at different times and draws on a wide range of contemporary case studies from the Global North and South.

The book offers students of geography and the social sciences a clear and authoritative introduction to the role population change plays in public policy.

John Rennie Short is Emeritus Professor in the School of Public Policy, University of Maryland Baltimore County. His research interests include cities, cartography and geopolitics. He has published widely in a range of journals and is the author of 50 books, including most recently The Rise and Fall of the National Atlas in the Twentieth Century (2022) and Geopolitics: Making Sense of A Changing World (2021).