PEOPLE AREN'T THE PROBLEM:

Of aging societies, lost women, lost consumers (Jayanthi Iyengar, 8/05/04, Asia Times)

Remember the fears of population explosion, when the world's biggest developing nations would push the global population to the catastrophic figure of 10 billion by the turn of this century? Those fears are fading. Research by the United Nations, the Austria-based International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and recent United States Census Bureau reports show that the world is unlikely to see a doubling of its population, which is currently pegged at around 6 billion. Instead, it is likely to peak at 9 billion by the turn of the century, resulting in a straight reduction of 1 billion in estimates from those made five years ago. Further, the global population is expected to shrink as people have fewer children and live longer.

Asia, home to the world's most populous countries, is not growing as fast as expected. Instead, it is graying, and quickly, though India is not graying in the same manner as China. For the next 50 years, India will be graying into middle age, while China, Japan and South Korea will gray into old age. Outside Asia, the graying is taking place all over the developing world, including the Middle East, which mitigates to an extent the geopolitical fears of an expanding young, aggressive Muslim population dictating the future of the world.

However, it also reinforces concerns over the kind of pressures that an aging population would place on the economies of Asia and the developing world. At a rough guess, these nations would have to provide for old-age support in the form of health care and pensions. Families would have to forgo earning capacity to take care of their elderly. The young and able-bodied in these nations would have to pay for the consumption expenditures of their old. These may compromise their own ability to work, consume, and generate wealth, which could impact the future of these countries as the new geopolitical power centers, and compromise their roles as the world's deepest consumption bins and labor bowls.

"As the relative numbers of dependent children decline, both China and India are enjoying what some call a 'demographic dividend'," said Phillip Longman, Benard L Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birth Rates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It. This means that today, middle-aged consumers have more to spend on themselves because they have fewer children to support. "In the future, however, both consumers in China and India will have to spend more and more on the elderly, either by directly supporting their own aging parents, or through government programs," Longman told Asia Times Online.

You'd think that rather than listening to the intellectual elites of the West these countries might have noticed that the U.S. was importing Third Worlders just as fast as we could to boost our own population and keep our own economy booming.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 5, 2004 12:39 PM