ADVISORY/Experts Available To Discuss Majority of World's Population Expected To Live in Urban Areas by 2007.

Business Editors

ADVISORY...

--(BUSINESS WIRE)

TOPIC: A report from United Nations demographers estimates the majority of the world's population will reside in cities by 2007, according to an article by Reuters. Forty-eight percent of the world's population resided in cities in 2003, and researchers expect that number to surpass 50 percent by 2007. It would be the first time ever where urban residents outnumbered rural residents.

EXPERTS: ExpertSource can offer several highly qualified experts to comment on this story:

Mark Montgomery is a senior associate in the Policy Research Division. He is also a professor in the Economics Department, State University of New York at Stony Brook. His current research interests lie in three areas: how diffusion dynamics operate in the spread of fertility control and other innovative forms of demographic behavior; the mechanisms underlying the quantity-quality transition, by which families come to have lower fertility but invest more in the schooling of their children; and the perceptual biases and lags inherent in social learning, the process through which individuals comprehend their socioeconomic environments by way of social interaction and information exchange. Montgomery joined the Population Council in 1993. Before that, he had been in the Office of Population Research, Princeton University and a Rockefeller Foundation senior fellow at the University of Lagos. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Population, and has served as co-chair of its Panel on Urban Population Dynamics. The National Academy Press published the panel's report "Cities Transformed," in 2003. Montgomery was editor of the report along with Richard Stren, Barney Cohen, and Holly Reed. PR Contact: Melissa May 212-339-0525 [e-mail]

John Bongaarts has worked at the Population Council since 1973. He recently served as chairman of the Panel on Population Projections of the National Academy of Sciences. He is also a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, a member of the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Some of the awards that he has received include the Robert J. Lapham Award and the Mindel Sheps Award from the Population Association of America and the Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health. Bongaarts has a master's degree in systems analysis from the Eindhoven Institute of Technology, Netherlands, and a Ph.D. in physiology and biomedical engineering from the University of Illinois. He can share his expertise on population issues, including the determinants of fertility, population-environment relationships, the demographic impact of the AIDS epidemic, and population policy options in the developing world. PR Contact: Melissa May 212-339-0525 [e-mail]

Professor Daniel Clay, of Michigan State University, Institute of International Agriculture, is an expert on issues concerning sociology, population, demography and rural development. 517-355-0174 517-355-1855 (University PR Phone)

ExpertSource cannot guarantee the immediate availability of these experts or their familiarity with this specific issue.

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