Serie de documentos de investigación

This paper examines the impact of prospective demographic trends in the population structure of Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico has experienced the first population decline in recorded history, which brings forth the question of the future of the population of the island and what are the policy implications of the transformations of the population. A Cohort‐Component Projections was used, incorporating rates of changes for fertility and mortality based in historical patterns. The net migration rates were calculated using the Residual Method or Vital Statistics Method, and three different scenarios were explored: (1) Full Migration, (2) Half Migration and (3) Zero Migration.

Scientists and intellectuals, government officials, journalists, and the general media have asserted that almost every single Caribbean island is overpopulated. Most of these claims are based on the relatively high population density of these islands in comparison to the rest of the countries of the Americas. This article investigates if population density is an appropriate indicator of overpopulation in the specific context of the insular Caribbean. The main sources of empirical information used in this article are: (1) national and regional population densities; (2) the human development index produced by the United Nations Development Program; and (3) a population projection of a “standing room-only island.” The article concludes that assertions of Caribbean island overpopulation, based on high population density, are methodological and statistical artifices or mathematical miscalculations. These artifices are the result of poor methodological choices: (1) the selection of geographic methodological scales;

This study models the graduation grade point average (GGPA) of 2,407 graduates of the University of Puerto Rico at Bayamón from 1995-96 to 2000-01. Empirical evidence shows that: (a) female and public school students obtain significantly higher GGPAs and exhibit advantages when compared to male and private school students, (b) the probability of accessing a determined boundary in the distribution of GGPAs is significantly and nonlinearly related to the admission policy, (c) GGPAs exhibit an uptrend that varies inversely and significantly with graduates’ quality, and (d) the probability of being in the lower bounds of the GGPAs distribution increases to the extent that graduates exceed graduation required time.