The world's population reached 6.5 billion this year. But considerable diversity in population size and growth lies behind the numbers. Population Challenges and Development Goals (PDF), a 70 page report prepared by the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the UN Secretariat, provides some of the answers.
The population of many countries, particularly those in Africa and Asia, will increase greatly in the coming decades. In contrast, owing to below-replacement fertility levels, some developed countries are expected to experience significant population decline. Half the world’s population is expected to live in urban areas by 2007.
Bit by bit the world is getting older, and more urbanised.
The number of very large urban agglomerations is increasing. Nonetheless, about half of all urban-dwellers live in small settlements with fewer than 500,000 inhabitants. In addition to becoming more urban, the world population is also becoming older and the proportion of older persons is expected to continue rising well into the twenty-first century.
It's not all grim news though. As the press release (PDF) explains, the reductions of fertility that developing countries began to experience in the 1970s and 1980s have opened up a “window of opportunity” by reducing the share of children in the population and increasing the proportions of persons of working age:
Provided jobs are available for the rising number of workers, developing countries can reap the benefits of the increased production and the lower costs associated with the decreasing proportion of dependent children.
Ed, something for you to chew over!
"But considerable diversity in population size and growth lies behind the numbers."
Yep I think this is the message. It is far from all being bad news. Some countries are obviously 'growing up' and this can be seen in their economic performance - the China, India, Thailand, Brazil, Turkey battalion, but there are and will be more. Fertility rates in general are coming down from the highs.
I don't quite think it is right to say that demographic ageing in the OECD is 'bad news', we do, after all, get to live longer. The difficult part is the transition dynamics from high growth, credit driven dynamics, to whatever will be the new steady state. The thing is also complicated by the existence of inter-generational liabilities in the form of things like Paygo pensions. But at the end of the day, while it might be a bumpy ride, the final product shouldn't be that bad.
The real bad news are the 18 countries - largely in Africa and the former USSR - where mortality rates are actually rising. Now that is bad news. This all came up in the UN human development report (which wasn't all about Ireland :)) , and I will probably post something on this on Afoe tomorrow.
Posted by: Edward Hugh | Thursday, September 15, 2005 at 05:42 PM