The Asian Demographic Research Institute (ADRI) at Shanghai University was first established on July 1 2015 as a strategic component of the School of Sociology and Political Sciences, and extended in early November of 2015 to be a university-wide research and resource center that focuses on multiscale comparative analysis of Asian population dynamics and its socioeconomic and environmental implications across Asian countries and subregions. The new initiative is inspired by the fundamental sociodemographic, economic, and environmental changes occurred in China and other Asian countries which make up more than half of the world population.
Our Vision:
ADRI aims to play a leading role in Asia for comprehensively investigating the population dynamics and addressing its socioeconomic and environmental implications in a comparative manner, and serve as a platform for regional collaboration of research and training.
Our Mission:
We conduct in-depth analysis in Asia using the most advanced demographic methods and the best available data in order to identify commonalities and differences among the Asian populations that make up more than half of the world population.
Formal demography is at the core of the scientific foundation of the institute. Building on the methods of multi-dimensional demography, we study population dynamics by age, gender, education, household status, and health condition, rural/urban residence, and the spatial distributions.
A set of formal demographic models at ADRI cater for a wide range of policy relevant topics in population research and population-economy-environment interactions. The research activities are organized and carried out within five research pillars, reflecting the emerging and important population research topics in Asia – Environment and Climate Change, Human Capital and Development, Internal Migration and Urbanization, International Migration, and Aging and Health.
To foster a lucrative scholastic environment and high performing culture for internationally comparative analysis, the faculty members of ADRI are recruited internationally, half of them be non-Chinese. All the courses for graduate students at PhD and Master degree levels are taught in English and the teaching materials are adopted from American and European universities. Graduate students and post-doc fellows will also be recruited globally.
From 2016, ADRI also serves as the headquarter of the Asian MetaCentre for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis, which was established in 2000 with initial funding from the Wellcome Trust as a regional center of excellence in population. ADRI strive to revitalize and broaden the activities of the MetaCenter through fostering research projects of common interest, holding annual Asian Population Fora, organizing demographic training workshops around the region, and hosting international visiting scholars.
In this context, ADRI closely collaborate with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and the other members of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, the National University of Singapore, Chulalongkorn University, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Australian National University, Asian Population Association and other relevant organizations.