tive to migrants has been answered by taking intoaccount possible relationships between internalmigration and regional economic performance. Tolook at this relationship more precisely, the con-nection between migration and unemployment hasbeen taken into account explicitly. Generally, highin-migration balances were found in the outer partsof the capital regions and regions with strongmodern industries, while high out-migration bal-ances were found in declining primary or olderindustrial regions. In Germany, Italy and the UKthere was a strong negative connection betweenunemployment and net internal migration. In mostof the transition countries, on the other hand,unemployment only marginally in¯uenced migra-tion patterns. As by 1994 the effects of the transitionto a market economy were not yet completed,however, this pattern may change in the nearfuture.Finally, in almost all countries gender differences

were found to be relatively unimportant in popula-tion redistribution, but signi®cant differences ex-isted in migration patterns across different lifecourse stages. In the non-transition countries,young adults were highly directed towards urbanareas, while families and older people moved out ofthe cities. In the transition countries the differencesbetween ages were less marked.All in all, the synthesis report as well as the

individual country reports are clearly written andwell structured. In the synthesis report, at ®rst alltopics are discussed on a country-by-country basis,while in the ®nal section of the book the results aresummarised and put into a pan-European andlonger-term perspective. By doing so, a well-organised report has been written in which thereader can easily ®nd either a comparative over-view of one topic for all countries concerned, anoverall overview of internal migration in Europe, or± in the country reports ± a detailed analysis of alltopics for one speci®c country. The disadvantage ofthis approach, however, is that the report containssome redundancies and that for some topics the

distinction between the different sections is some-what vague. For instance, the question of whetherurban agglomerations lose or gain population isdiscussed in different sections using country-speci®c urbanisation de®nitions or populationdensity as criteria. Population density as surrogatefor the degree of urbanisation is added to use aunivocal variable which is available for mostcountries. Country-speci®c urbanisation de®ni-tions, however, may be partly based on populationdensity, but the connection between the tworemains hidden in the synthesis report. Somethingsimilar happens in the discussion on the relation-ship between net internal migration and eithereconomic performance or unemployment. Never-theless, these are only minor drawbacks in compar-ison with the huge amount of information and thenew insights in internal migration developments inEurope. To conclude, therefore, the report may bestrongly recommended to anyone who is interestedin internal migration patterns in general, andparticularly to those who are interested in intra-national migration trends in Europe. With agrowing interest in regional population develop-ments in Europe, the report may also be of greatvalue to (European) policy-makers.

NICOLE VAN DER GAAG

Netherlands Interdisciplinary DemographicInstitute, The Netherlands

NOTES

(1) The country report of Italy (`Internal migrationand regional population dynamics in Italy' by P.Rees, E. Todisco, V. Terra Abrami, H. Durhamand M. Kupiszewski, published by ISTAT) hasbeen reviewed by John Stillwell in InternationalJournal of Population Geography 5: 69±75(1999).

(2) Courgeau D. 1973. Migrations et deÂcoupages duterritoire. Population 28: 511±537.

POPULATION FORECASTING 1895±1945: THETRANSITION TO MODERNITY by Henk de Gans.Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 1999. No.of pages: xviii� 291. Price: £75.00 (hardback). ISBN0 7923 5537 7.

This book focuses on the transition that took placein the early twentieth century from simple curve-

®ttingmethods of population projection to themoreconceptually sophisticated cohort component ap-proach. Most population texts that include discus-sions of the origins of the cohort component methodtend to give prominence to British or Americanauthors such as Cannan, Bowley, Whelpton andLeslie. This book, based on de Gans's PhD thesis,convincingly demonstrates that such accounts are

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466 Book Reviews

incomplete and that Dutch authors made substan-tial contributions to early population projectionmethodology. Originally setting out to write ahistory of population forecasting in the Netherlandsin the ®rst half of the twentieth century, the authorrealised early on in his research that the innovativecontributions made by Dutch demographers at thetime are generally absent from international re-views. Finding out why this is the case became anadditional aim of the research.

The book is organised into nine chapters. Chapter1 introduces the book, includes aims and de®ni-tions, and sets out the organising framework of thestudy ±Kuhnian paradigms. De Gans proposes thatthe history of population forecasting in the earlytwentieth century can be best explained in terms ofa paradigm shift from curve-®tting total populationmethods to cohort component methods, and thebattle for dominance between adherents of the oldand new paradigms.The story of population forecasting in the Nether-

lands begins in Chapter 2 which takes a biographi-cal approach to the life and work of one of theDutch pioneers of population projection, GerhardWiebols. In 1925 Wiebols presented a populationprojection for the Netherlands using age-speci®cmortality probabilities and age-speci®c fertilityrates. Although this was not quite in the form ofpopulation projections made today, it was none-theless the ®rst cohort component-type projectioncarried out for the Netherlands, and althoughWiebols's contribution was not the ®rst to involveage disaggregation, it was considerably more care-fully constructed and sophisticated.

The third chapter is entitled `The emergence ofdemographic forecasting in Europe' and is a veryuseful analysis of advances made in populationprojection methods from a number of authorsthroughout Europe. One of the greatest strengthsof the chapter (and indeed the book) is the way inwhich the author sets the intellectual developmentsin population projection methods of the time in thecontext of the various social, economic and politicalfactors which help to explain the course of thosedevelopments. For example, Cannan's 1895 projec-tion of the population of England and Wales ± `Theprobability of the cessation of growth of populationin England and Wales in the next century' ± wasmade in part to question the Malthusian view ofever-expanding population growth. Fahlbeck's1905 work, set in a eugenic framework, wasprompted by a concern that fertility in the Europeanruling classes was much lower than the populationas a whole and that their failure to reproduce wouldlead to the decline of civilised nations. As well asexamining the broader societal context, de Gans

also considers various personal factors in his study.It is both useful and interesting to know whichauthors studied under others, what internationalconferences were attended, what personal friend-ships and animosities existed and the in¯uence thevarious actors had in their jobs. A number ofvignettes are included throughout the chapterswhich give brief synopses of the principal char-acters involved in early Dutch population forecast-ing.Chapter 4 focuses on the `struggle for paradigm

dominance' between the cohort component ap-proach and the curve-®tting approach whichoccurred in the 1920s. It seemed at times that thelogistic model would become dominant: it origi-nated in the `true science' of biology, it wasconsidered by many to be a solid mathematicallaw of population, and it was promoted byrespected and in¯uential scientists. Again, de Gansbrings out the importance of personal and institu-tional factors by noting, for example, that one of keyspeakers at the 1927 World Population Conferencewas Raymond Pearl, one of the foremost advocatesof the logistic growth model. At the 1930 conferenceof the International Statistical Institute, however,the cohort component approach proved dominant,and this was not unrelated to the fact that thisapproach was favoured by members of the Board ofthe Institute, who organised the conference. It ischapters 3 and 4, which provide a detailed andfascinating insight into the international develop-ment of the cohort component forecasting ap-proach, that are the best part of the book. They arestrongly recommended for anyone interested inpopulation projection methods.In the following chapter (Chapter 5), de Gans

gives a detailed account of the development ofprojection methodology in the Netherlands, beforediscussing in Chapter 6 the relationship betweenpopulation and housing need forecasts. In Chapter7 some examples of early applications of the newapproach are discussed, including the in¯uence ontown planning in the Netherlands. Chapter 8focuses on the `implications of the new paradigm',such as the increased involvement of forecasters inpolicy-making, the weakening of the link betweenforecasting and `true' science, and a changed viewof the concept of time. These chapters give a verydetailed picture of the development of populationforecasting methods in the Netherlands in the earlytwentieth century and their various applicationsand implications, and will be of use to anyoneinterested in this speci®c area of study.In the conclusion in Chapter 9, de Gans returns to

the question of why the work of the Dutch authorshas gone unrecognised for so long. There are a

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Book Reviews 467

number of reasons, among them the fact that manyof the Dutch forecasting innovators did not belongto the small community of representatives atinternational conferences. Those statisticians whoparticipated in the conferences belonged to a schoolof statistics that opposed forecasting, and authorsreviewing population forecasting methods haveused sources which have omitted the work ofDutch authors. Interestingly, de Gans argues thatthe publication of these innovative ideas in Dutch isa weak argument for the poor communication ofinnovative forecasting methods, given that Scandi-navian contributions are frequently cited in theliterature.Overall, this is a very interesting book and a

valuable contribution to the literature. Henk deGans has brought together an impressive variety of

literature (in a number of different languages) aswell as numerous biographical details to elucidatethe development of population projection methodsfrom those based on total population curve-®ttingmethods to the more sophisticated cohort compo-nent approach. There are a few very minor short-comings in the book. A few citations in the text havebeen omitted from the references, and the utility ofthe term `demographic forecasting' to refer essen-tially to the cohort component approach to popula-tion projection is debatable. There is also a tendencyin some sections for the writing to be a little verboseand repetitive (but perhaps this is meant asemphasis).

TOM WILSON

University of Leeds, UK

Copyright # 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Int. J. Popul. Geogr. 6, 463±468 (2000)

468 Book Reviews