We reexamine the relationship between the city size distribution and economic development of a country by using a new data set provided by Thomas Brinkhoff. We have made use of data on 118 countries in two census periods. The empirical results allow us to confirm that there is an invertedU shape between per capita of income and primacy index. There is a positive relationship between the primacy index and the economic development among the low income countries. However, there is a negative relationship between the two variables among high income countries. This paper also suggests that the central place theory has dominated influence on the city size distribution. Scale and agglomeration economies in production promote urban concentration while land rent and higher transport cost foster population dispersal. The results indicate that population dispersal will accompany with a countrys development and the population in primacy city of China will shrink in the future.

Fertility rate, population growth, and economic development are usually causally correlated with complex relationships among each other. The mainstream academic point of views towards demography from literature highly depend on the economic development level at that time. In the early time, the literature mainly focused on the interrelationship between population and economic development. After the 1990s, a growing number of scholars believed that demographic structure, rather than population size, is more important for economic growth. Demographic dividend is also correlated with demographic transition, fertility rate, and even the one-child policy. In addition, as economists began to introduce population issues into the framework of macroeconomic, lots of interdisciplinary research emerged in recent years. In this paper, population and macroeconomic issues are summarized according to different stages of research, and the potential research directions are given in the end.

Looking backward sixty years development and the pros and cons of Demography Science in China,analyzing the existing problems and challenges,we argue that the development of Demography Science has a bearing on the capacity building,that is the constant innovation and expanding application of theories and methods of demography.One of the important factors affecting capacity building is to have the academic team of demography that is expanding in size,improving in structure and enhancing in disciplinary awareness and construction ability.