Immigration is one of the most salient topics in public debate. Social media heavily influences opinions on immigration, often sparking polarized debates and offline tensions. Studying 220,870 immigration-related tweets in the UK, we assessed the extent of polarization, key content creators and disseminators, and the speed of content dissemination.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWalmart is a major player in the US retail sector and was one of the grocery corporations that bucked the trend of declining retail sales at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Particularly in the initial stages of the pandemic, governance priorities focussed on restricting the movement of people and closing non-essential retailers and service providers to slow the spread of the virus and keep people safe. This paper investigates the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions, in the form of lockdown stringency measures, on consumer purchasing behaviours for essential goods over the onset of the pandemic.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExisting empirical work has focused on assessing the effectiveness of nonpharmaceutical interventions on human mobility to contain the spread of COVID-19. Less is known about the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped the spatial patterns of population movement within countries. Anecdotal evidence of an urban exodus from large cities to rural areas emerged during early phases of the pandemic across western societies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious studies have examined the impact of COVID-19 on mortality and fertility. However, little is known about the effect of the pandemic on constraining international migration. We use Eurostat and national statistics data on immigration and ARIMA time-series models to quantify the impact of COVID-19 on immigration flows in 15 high-income countries by forecasting their counterfactual levels in 2020, assuming no pandemic, and comparing these estimates with observed immigration counts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDuring the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, anecdotal evidence of a "rural revival" emerged mirroring the "urban exodus" hypothesis. Currently, we know that internal migration to rural areas increased in some countries during 2020, although not with the intensity speculated by the media. However, little is known about the attributes of rural areas attracting migrants, demographic composition of migration inflows, and if counterurbanisation movements persisted over 2021.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInternational graduates have been shown to experience comparatively poor outcomes in their transition to the host labour market after course completion. In Australia, international graduates typically fare worse than domestic graduates in the labour market, with new evidence pointing to a deterioration in their relative labour market position over the years. The contributing factors for the deterioration, however, remain unclear.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCOVID-19, and the wider social and economic impacts that a global pandemic entails, led to unprecedented reductions in energy consumption globally. Whilst estimates of changes in energy consumption have emerged at the national scale, detailed sub-regional estimates to allow for global comparisons are less developed. Using night-time light satellite imagery from December 2019-June 2020 across 50 of the world's largest urban conurbations, we provide high resolution estimates (450 m) of spatio-temporal changes in urban energy consumption in response to COVID-19.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe spatial distribution of activities and agents within cities, conceptualised as an urban function, profoundly affects how different areas are perceived and lived. This dataset introduces the concept of functional signatures - contiguous areas of a similar urban function delineated based on enclosed tessellation cells (ETC) - and applies it to the area of Great Britain. ETCs are granular spatial units, which capture function based on interpolations from open data inputs stretching from remote sensing to land use, census and points of interest data.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper develops the notion of "open data product". We define an open data product as the open result of the processes through which a variety of data (open and not) are turned into accessible information through a service, infrastructure, analytics or a combination of all of them, where each step of development is designed to promote open principles. Open data products are born out of a (data) need and add value beyond simply publishing existing datasets.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAs cities expand, human mobility has become a central focus of urban planning and policy making to make cities more inclusive and sustainable. Initiatives such as the "15-minutes city" have been put in place to shift the attention from monocentric city configurations to polycentric structures, increasing the availability and diversity of local urban amenities. Ultimately they expect to increase local walkability and increase mobility within residential areas.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study aimed to estimate the prevalence of three measures of multimorbidity among people aged 50 years or older in England. Beside the basic measure of two or more diseases within a person, we added a measure of three or more affected body systems (complex multimorbidity) and a measure of 10 or more functional limitations. We found that the three health outcomes became more prevalent between 2002 and 2015.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study explores longitudinal relationships between material, psycho-social and behavioural social determinants of health and multimorbidity of people aged 50 years or older in England. We used data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing collected biannually between 2002 and 2015. Apart from the basic measure of multimorbidity (two or more diseases within a person) we constructed two distinct measures of health in order to take into account the biology of ageing (complex multimorbidity and multiple functional limitations).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInternal migration is a key driver of patterns of human settlement and socio-economic development, but little is known about its compositional impacts. Exploiting the wide availability of census data, we propose a method to quantify the internal migration impacts on local population structures, and estimate these impacts for eight large Latin American cities. We show that internal migration generally had small feminizing, downgrading educational, and demographic window effects: reducing the local sex ratio, lowering the average years of schooling, and raising the share of working-age population due to an increased young adult population.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhile considerable progress has been made in understanding the way particular aspects of internal migration, such as its intensity, age profile and spatial impact, vary between countries around the world, little attention to date has been given to establishing how these dimensions of migration interact in different national settings. We use recently developed measures of internal migration that are scale-independent to compare the overall intensity, age composition, spatial impact, and distance profile of internal migration in 19 Latin American countries. Comparisons reveal substantial cross-national variation but cluster analysis suggests the different dimensions of migration evolve systematically to form a broad sequence characterised by low intensities, young ages at migration, unbalanced flows and high friction of distance at lower levels of development, trending to high intensities, an older age profile of migration, more closely balanced flows and lower friction of distance at later stages of development.
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