Including an environmental quality index in a demographic model

Abstract

is a lecturer at the University of Valencia. She received her Master's degree in Mathemathics (2008) from the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain, and obtained his PhD in Mathematics (2012) also from the Polytechnic University of Valencia. His main research domains are General Systems Theory and System Dynamics, with more than 10 published papers and 7 congress communications. Antonio Caselles is a retired (2009) lecturer and member of the Applied Mathematics Department at the University of Valencia (Spain). He received his Master's degree in Agricultural Engineering (1970) from the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain) and obtained his Doctor degree in Agricultural Engineering (1978) from the same university. His main research domains are General Systems Theory and Systems Dynamics, with more than 150 published papers and congress communications.

A stochastic dynamical social model involving a human happiness index

“…The starting point of the demographic model is the model presented by Micó et al [29] without age structure, where all variables depend on time , refers to female and refers to male: - (16) Where POPL i is the total population per sex, RFER i is the birth rate per sex, RDEF i is the death rate per sex, and RINM i and REMM i are the immigration and emigration rate, respectively. Previous works have demonstrated that the demographic rates depend on the well-being indices of the UN [15,30] and on the environmental quality index [13].…”

“…The mathematical structures considered to formulate the demographic rates (of fertility, mortality, emigration and immigration) are described as logistic functions of the two indices HAIN and EQUI as follows: (18) Where, (19) And, refers to female and refers to male. Note that x is not differentiated by sex because neither HAIN nor EQUI [13] are differentiated by sex. However, the parameters of Eq.…”

“…In [13] the birth and death rates are calculated by multiplying the well-being indices HDI, GDI and GEM, and dividing by EQUI. This is due to the fact that the four indices take values between 0 and 1 but the values close to 1 for the first three mean a quality improvement in the studied country, while the values close to 0 for EQUI represent a better situation with respect to the global warming.…”

“…Note that HAIN will not reflect the environmental average impact, contrarily to the HPI. This is due to the fact that an environmental index already exists [13], which will also be taken into account in the dynamic model that will be proposed in this paper.…”

“…Previous works use quality of life variables to compute demographic rates. For instance, Sanz et al [13] created an environmental index that was introduced in the rates of fecundity and mortality, showing how this index affects both rates. Sanz et al [15] also used the Gender Development Index [11] to calculate the rates of fecundity.…”