LOSING THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE

Global trends in population can derail international business (Penn State, June 5, 2003)

A Penn State expert on global business issues urges the international business community to pay attention to four major issues with regard to global trends in population if it wishes to operate on the world stage: population growth, aging, immigration and urbanization.

"The world population distribution has been, and will continue, to shift more toward the less-developed nations of the world, while the more-developed nations will continue to see their populations increasingly marginalized in comparison to the rest of the world," said Fariborz Ghadar, director of the Center for Global Business Studies at Penn State. [...]

As the relative size of a nation's population shifts compared to the rest of the world, so will its age distribution. While across the board nations will become older due to advances in medicine, Ghadar said the relative size of their working populations will see dramatic alterations.

Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Mid-East will experience "youth bulges" in their demographics in which a growth spurt in population causes problems with employment and resource allocation within a country.

"This does however serve to increase the relative size of the working population and in turn increase the potential for economic growth. In other areas, specifically Western Europe and Japan, their aging population will soon prove to be a massive liability. Declining birthrates and the increasing maturity of these nations will combine to up the costs in the fields of health care and pension funds, while at the same time reducing the relative size of the working population. As a result, national productivity will drop and so then will the governments’ ability to meet the social contract they have established with their citizenry," said Ghadar. In addition to his role as executive director of the Center for Global Business Studies, Ghadar is considered by many of his peers to be the leader on research investigating the growing new field known as global tectonics--multifunctional business issues that will shape economies in the future.

"Immigration can help to relieve some of the woes created by a disproportionate age distribution within a country. The U.S. will be able to maintain its global population standing not by its own fertility, but by its relative open immigration policy, and the same applies for Canada, Australia and New Zealand," said Ghadar.

He points out that legal and illegal immigrants now account for more than 15 percent of the population in more than 50 countries, and this number will only grow in time. More developed countries and their aging work force need to replace their retirees with immigrant labor if they wish to prolong their economic vitality and avoid labor shortages.

Europe and Japan, Ghadar predicts, will have the toughest time with this process due to the dilemma they face with protecting their national borders and firming up their cultural identity, while at the same time facing the harsh reality that their populations can no longer meet the needs of their industries. For the less-developed countries, emigration will be a double-edged sword in that while it will relieve significant amounts of pressure on unemployment and infrastructure requirements, it also will deprive these nations of their best and brightest.

The point of the Anglosphere, and the reason it uniquely stands to benefit, is that it accepts people of many cultures so long as they accept the governing ideas of the Anglo-American tradition. The crisis that confronts the rest of the West is largely a result of the loss of faith in these ideas. Those here who would replace these core values with multiculturalism, materialist relativism, and the like, have missed the point entirely and risk ruining mankind's greatest achievement, the last best hope of Man on Earth: our civilization. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 5, 2003 7:05 PM