Some demographic crashes seen as phase transitions

Mircea Gligor and Margareta Ignat

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2001, vol. 301, issue 1, 535-544

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is the application of a usual method of statistical mechanics—the renormalization based on Wilson's recursive relations—in order to study the critical behavior of a social index, namely the live births per 1000 population. The drastic decreases of this index on certain periods have the specific features of the phase transitions as they follow approximately power laws and also, they lead to the complete change of the population age structure. The values of the critical exponents that are obtained by fitting the experimental data referring to some East European countries are in agreement with the value resulting from the theoretical approach, thus showing the universality of the power law behavior in the vicinity of the critical points, for complex social systems.

Keywords: Renormalization group; Power law; Critical exponent; Social phenomena (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037843710100423X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:301:y:2001:i:1:p:535-544

DOI: 10.1016/S0378-4371(01)00423-X

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().