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The Death of the West: An alternative view a
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Population Studies, 2015 Vol. 69, No. S1, S107–S118, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2014.970401
The Death of the West: An alternative view David Coleman and Stuart Basten
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University of Oxford
Much has been written about the ‘Death of the West’, a demise threatened by the low level of reproduction in Western countries. That fate is contrasted unfavourably with the rapid growth of the populations and economies of less developed countries, and the prospect of the numerical and political marginalization of the formerly dominant developed world. We believe that trends in European fertility have been misunderstood and that, with effort and some pain, their consequences for age structure are manageable. Many European societies also enjoy the advantages of demographic and social maturity, the resilience of established consensual democratic institutions, the rule of law, and civil society. The sizes of China and India raise problems of resource sustainability and vulnerability to climate change. China risks falling into a low-fertility trap, reinforced by urban working conditions unfriendly to family formation. Traditional patriarchal and familist cultures may depress fertility rates to unhelpfully low levels in other less developed countries.
Keywords: low fertility; population ageing; population decline; geopolitical marginalization; BRICS; China; India
Introduction In recent years, much has been written about the ‘Death of the West’, its proximate cause of ‘demographic malnutrition’, and the underlying problem of its ‘defective values’ (Buchanan 2002). In these respects ‘The West’ is best exemplified by ‘Old Europe’, according to the diagnosis being made from the safer shores of North America, especially by some notably ideological critics (e.g., Steyn 2006; Laqueur 2007). There, an extensive literature points out that Europe is irretrievably shrinking on the world stage (Longman 2004; Wattenberg 2004). The continent’s perceived preference for welfare over production and for secularism over religion apparently brings with it a ‘catastrophic’ failure of reproduction. In the view of some of these authors, low birth rates bring unsustainable levels of population ageing and decline which only an inflow of more vigorous immigrants can moderate, an inflow that will create a hostile Islamized society unfriendly to what is left of European civilization (Last 2013). Some of this critique is supported by the blunt facts of low period fertility and projections of decline and ageing for many of Europe’s countries (Winter and Teitelbaum 2013). Other elements, however, form part of a rather enjoyable but somewhat tabloid ‘demographic
© 2015 Population Investigation Committee
disaster’ scenario, viewed with mixed sympathy and schadenfreude from across the Atlantic. Certainly, it is clear that the global demographic future is not European, nor in the longer run does it belong to the USA. Most population projections allot about 7 per cent of the world’s population to Europe by 2050, against the 25 per cent or so that was its share in the late nineteenth century. That permanent shift in population balance arises fundamentally from the earlier demographic transition in the ‘West’ and the century-long interval before the later transition elsewhere. In the West, natural increase and demographic momentum are exhausted or nearly so, while both remain vigorous in much of the rest of the world. Deaths have exceeded births in Germany since 1972, in Italy since 1993, and in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and much of Eastern Europe since at least 1996. Immigration has prevented overall population decline in Italy but only intermittently in Germany, which first experienced population decline in 1974 and then again from 2004 until 2011. Population in Russia and much of Eastern Europe has been in decline for two decades or more, being halted in Russia only from 2012. Some Eastern European countries, such as Bulgaria, are projected to decline by 40 per cent or more by 2060 (UNPD 2013). The population of the
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European Union continues to grow but only by adding the inhabitants of demographically ‘weak’ new member countries that have lower fertility, and higher rates of mortality and emigration than existing members. The USA (along with Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, together with the UK as a group of countries known as the ‘Anglosphere’ (Bennett 2007)) grows by adding people through its own natural increase and by attracting immigrants from around the world. Population ageing, following inevitably from controlled fertility and, later on, from longer life, compounds this apparent enfeeblement. Not only, then, is the demographic diminution of Europe, and the ‘West’ more broadly, clearly in sight but so is the prospect of its older populations being weakened economically and becoming arguably less innovative and vigorous. Purely economic challenges to pensions systems and elderly care are serious enough (Bloom et al. 2011), imposing new burdens on the working population and ending the expectation that each new generation will be better off than its parents. Barring unexpected checks, increases in expectation of life may be considerably greater than forecast according to some innovative analyses (Ediev 2011). Many argue (e.g., Skirbekk 2008) that an older workforce is inherently less productive and innovative, echoing the earlier pessimism of Sauvy (1966). These developments will have further malign consequences. Austerity measures to sustain pensions may challenge established democratic institutions (Cincotta 2012). Some claim, controversially, that collective action and solidarity in Western countries may be weakened by the growth of poorly integrated minorities (Collier 2013; Goodhart 2013). Military security, energy security, and geopolitical influence will all be lost or weakened, with Europe losing ground to the USA, and the USA losing ground to the rest (Last 2013). The West, history makers for the last two centuries or more, will become history takers as the economic and political and possibly global cultural future passes to the growing and increasingly rich populations of China (Jacques 2012), India and the rest of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, and South Africa) and MINTs (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Turkey) will dominate the world population and economy. Believing that both sides of this argument are, in truth, a bit overdone, this paper explores two propositions that moderate the scenario of a stark dichotomous future of failing ‘Old Europe’ and the runaway success of BRICS, MINTs, and others. Firstly, we suggest that the fertility trends underpinning European society are not terminal but
reversible. With effort and some pain, their age structure consequences are manageable, although Southern and Eastern European countries face particular cultural and institutional disadvantages (Lesthaeghe and Permanyer 2014). Secondly, we propose that the enthusiastic endorsement of a new world order generated by current low- and middleincome countries ignores a number of impediments, not the least being demographic problems.
Escaping from the low-fertility trap In support of the first proposition, evidence accumulating over some years now permits a more upbeat view of ‘Western’ birth rates. The public, journalists, and even some academics have become a little mesmerized by the constant repetition of talk of ‘Europe’s falling birth rate’. However, for many years now, especially in the Western part of the continent, the birth rate has been doing no such thing, not even by the uncertain indicator of period total fertility. Instead, average total fertility in Western Europe has been edging up slightly since the 1980s. While growth in Northern Europe has been strong (albeit from a lower minimum), even Eastern and Southern European birth rates have crept up slowly from their ‘lowest-low’ nadir (Billari and Kohler 2004). Since the late 1990s the deflating effects of delay in births on the total fertility measure has become well recognized (Bongaarts and Feeney 1998); fertility was not, in many cases, as low as it seemed. If women were to produce the average two or more children that successive surveys suggested they desired, postponement had to end. That now appears to have happened in many European countries (Bongaarts and Sobotka 2012). Total fertility has risen to levels not seen since the 1970s in France (2.0), the UK (1.9), and other NW European countries. Family policy may have had a role here, intentionally or otherwise. There are indications that both period and cohort fertility may rise further. Myrskylä et al. (2009) point to an apparent reversal, from 1975 to 2008, of the trend for fertility to fall with rising values of the Human Development Index (HDI), appearing to indicate that further development encouraged a rise in birth rates, just as classical economics always suggested it should. However, that study has been criticized on various grounds (Harttgen and Vollmer 2014; Lesthaeghe and Permanyer 2014; Luci-Greulich and Thévenon 2014). The claimed effect, according to critics, is mostly driven by higher fertility at older
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Decline of the West ages of women, and facilitated by favourable trends in income and gender equality, complementing the recuperation hypothesis (Myrskylä et al. 2011). The story is complex and mixed. The spread of higher education among women is a crucial component of development. Generally, women graduates have children later (Ní Bhrolcháin and Beaujouan 2012) and have lower than average overall fertility, notably in German-speaking countries. There, life is made difficult for working mothers by such adverse institutional arrangements as schools that close at lunchtime, shops with limited opening times, and the reluctance of employers to offer part-time work. Elsewhere the fertility-depressing effect of education is weak and may be reversing. Women graduates delay childbearing and often remain childless, but are also more likely to progress from a first to a second and further birth (Klesment and Puur 2013). Looking to the future, these upward trends are expected to continue, despite the check to the birth rate presented by the economic recession since 2008 in most Western countries. Only a few countries (e.g., France) have escaped this check. Given the favourable trends in the major determinants of the birth rate in developed countries noted above, cohort fertility is projected to increase in most countries, albeit from low levels in some (Myrskylä et al. 2013). Recent Eastern European immigrants to the UK have remarkably high period fertility (Dormon 2014). While that might just be the usual transient ‘immigration effect’ on fertility (Toulemon 2004), or a selection effect, it may also indicate that there is nothing intrinsic about the current low fertility in Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, and elsewhere and that economic and policy reform, and cultural change in those countries might eventually promote a substantial fertility increase. Moreover, population reproduction (the extent to which the population maintains or increases its size across generations) is now much less dependent solely upon natural increase. Developed countries, except those of Eastern Europe and East Asia, receive large immigrant inflows, wanted and unwanted, from non-Western countries. These immigrants and their natural increase take overall levels of population reproduction well above replacement in some richer countries, contributing to a renewal of substantial rates of population growth and changing its ethnic composition. Thus, while certainly not without its challenges, international migration is the chief element in the population dynamics of many countries (Ediev et al. 2013; Wilson et al. 2013). It can moderate population ageing somewhat and may strengthen the resources of the labour force.
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These demographic trends and the forces that underlie them suggest that the popular pessimistic scenario for ‘The West’ may be misplaced. That is not to say that problems relating to low fertility, population ageing, and the rest can be ignored—far from it—especially in those countries, notably in Central and Eastern Europe, that remain in a chronically worse condition than others. Nonetheless, the purely demographic outlook for population ageing seems to be rather more favourable than once thought. The West will not disappear nor die of old age. While it seems unlikely that in many countries total fertility itself will rise to replacement levels, it is widely believed that population ageing can be managed by non-demographic measures as long as total fertility remains above a ‘safe limit’ variously interpreted as 1.7 or 1.5 (McDonald 2006). Some analyses go further, claiming that sub-replacement fertility is optimal for welfare when education is factored into the age structure and the dependency ratio. Education imposes costs but an educated workforce is much more productive (Lutz et al. 2012; Striessnig and Lutz 2013). New measures and analyses of population ageing such as ‘prospective ageing’, based on the number of years left to live rather than chronological age, give a much more favourable picture of the current and future burden of dependency (Sanderson and Scherbov 2010). Moreover, Western populations have enjoyed high levels of education and health for generations. Thanks to that, cognitive powers of older cohorts, on various measures, are superior to those of the same age among the emerging powers, extending health and the capacity to work later into life. Indices of ageing weighted by cognitive functioning equalize or even reverse the rank order of population ageing between the West and some of the emerging powers, with the USA and Northern Europe emerging with the lowest burden (Skirbekk et al. 2012). The slow process of cohort replacement would preserve any such advantage for many years. Furthermore, non-demographic considerations put the overall position of the West in a better light (Morris 2010). For example, demographic gloom has been greatly encouraged by the habit of assuming the permanence of traditional fixed age limits for workforce entry, workforce departure, and overall participation. That is quite absurd. It suggests the absence of institutional or personal adaptations to longer life and to the costs of longer retirement, but in fact adaptations have been occurring. Despite understandable popular opposition and resistance from vested interests, ages of entitlement to pensions, for example,
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are being forced upwards by government action, in some cases formally in line with increase in life expectation (Italy and Sweden) and by the reaction of individuals to the prospect of inadequate pensions. The West is at least becoming old after it has become rich, not before. Harsh austerity measures in response to the economic crisis have accelerated these necessary adaptations. A dependency ratio that is more favourable than expected does not remove the certainty of much larger numbers of older people in the future, of an age vulnerable to physical handicap and dementia. However, set against that prospect are upward trends in the proportion of a longer age span spent in healthy life in many countries (not all) and the slower than expected increase in the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease (20 per cent lower in the UK, for example, than projected in the past) possibly as a result of the same social and economic advances noted earlier (Christensen et al. 2013; Matthews et al. 2013). Finally, for all their undoubted ills, European and other Western societies enjoy some advantages of demographic and social maturity which enhance their resilience and stability. Demographic and democratic transitions and social, economic, and educational developments have been slow and have kept pace with each other, leading to relatively stable demographic and political regimes. Many European societies possess long-term established and consensual democratic institutions, respect for the rule of law, and a complex civil society linking individuals and groups in many ways (Almond and Verba 1989). Whatever the new problems of social fission arising from immigration, most societies have put behind them ancestral divisions of tribe and language. Trust tends to be relatively high. For the most part, gesellschaft has replaced gemeinschaft. Perceptions of a common citizenship help to sustain welfare consensus in a way that kin-based smaller-scale communities find more difficult. Culture and institutions matter in determining the success and failure of nations (Landes 1998; Lipset and Lenz 2000; Harrison 2006; Acemoglu and Robinson 2013). Moreover, looking to the larger scale and the longer term, most climate change scenarios, although beneficial for few, do not locate the biggest challenges in ‘Western’ countries and two of the biggest—Russia and Canada—could enjoy some environmental benefits.
The view from the South Demographically and economically, the rise to predominance of Asia, Latin America, and, perhaps
later, Africa, would seem to be inevitable. That is obviously true of population size, and will apply to the growth of economic, political, and military power if the effects of numbers are magnified by economic growth. As non-Western economies develop, a great re-equilibration is in progress, tending to reverse the ‘great divergence’ of the eighteenth century (Pomeranz 2000). The consequences will go far beyond restoring the balance of power and wealth between East and West to its position in the seventeenth century. Europe will henceforth comprise scarcely 7 per cent of the global population instead of its historical peak of 25 per cent in the eighteenth century. Furthermore, modern communications and globalization will enable any future dominant powers of the ‘global South’ to exercise much more power globally than was possible in previous centuries. In those days, the inhabitants of some continents were unaware even of the existence of some other continents. Are those critics right, then, who see Europe’s future demographic marginalization confining it henceforth to the sidelines, even if it can survive its internal demographic problems? In fact, the future may not be as one-sidedly in favour of non-Western countries as this scenario suggests. The very speed of the demographic transitions in these countries—at least in mortality—compared with that of the West has made them vulnerable to instabilities and contradictions that may take decades to resolve. The speed of their economic transitions is often unmatched by adjustments in society, culture, and political institutions. The nature of their cultures is often inimical to rapid adjustment. Moreover, in some cases the very fact of their large populations and fast population growth poses intractable social and economic problems. With these issues in mind, we devote the remainder of the paper to reasons for caution in making assumptions about the role played by demography in shaping the future supremacy of BRICS and MINTs.
Low fertility and rapid ageing The most intriguing possibility is that the birth rate might fall in many of these populations to a level lower than that in much of Europe and the USA, leading to substantial population ageing before the economy becomes mature enough to sustain the cost of the ageing. Almost everywhere fertility is falling. Half the world’s populations now live in countries where the birth rate is below replacement, including Brazil, Iran, Turkey, and the southern half of India,
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Decline of the West although these countries have decades of momentum growth still to come (e.g., for Asia, see Basten, forthcoming). Some may face decades of subreplacement fertility (Brazil, Iran, Thailand, Indonesia), an experience already familiar in China. Russia’s recent fertility revival, meanwhile, has been dismissed as a temporary tempo shift (Frejka and Zakharov 2013), its diminished population only kept afloat by immigration, elements of which are unlikely to contribute to its political or social stability. Table 1 shows how birth rates in some less developed countries have already fallen below some in the West. In both East-Asian (and some South-East) settings, there is significant pessimism about the chance of a reversal of fertility trends. This is shared by demographers (Frejka et al. 2010; Basten et al. 2014a), social policy specialists (Sun 2012; Song et al. 2013), and specialists in local statistical offices (Basten 2013a), all of whom assume stagnation in fertility rates in the medium term in the absence of some major policy shifts. That assumption is supported by the cohort projections of Myrskylä et al. (2013), which offer little expectation of recovery in these countries in the short run. Another source of pessimistic expectations are the structural impediments that help sustain ultra-low fertility rates: an inadequate improvement in the status of women; the high direct costs of childcare and opportunity costs of childbearing; child-unfriendly cities; weak state support for childbearing; and long working hours. The effect of these impediments has been reinforced by decades of frequently aggressive (and, in the case of China, coercive) family planning programmes.
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Furthermore, in what appears to be the development of a new paradigm, fertility preferences in a number of major East and South East Asian territories are being reported more frequently as being (well) below replacement—and falling. In both Hong Kong and Taiwan, the most recent surveys report ideal family sizes of between 1.5 and 1.8, while in China a number of studies have identified a prevailing preference for a one-child family in urban areas and, increasingly, in rural areas (Basten 2013b; Basten and Jiang 2015, this issue). Outside East Asia, in Thailand the ideal family size is just 1.9 (UNFPA 2011) and in (urban) India, among the quintile with the highest education and income, up to 25 per cent of women desire only a one-child family, with respondents reporting that there is no social stigma attached to this choice (Basu and Desai 2010). Cultural patterns that promote low fertility may be very widespread in modernizing societies in the less developed world. Patriarchal familist societies, those in which family and kin obligations dominate social life, tend to have low fertility when modernizing, not least because of the extra burdens usually placed on women. The low birth rates in Southern Europe and East Asia are examples. If these familist cultures engender low birth rates as they modernize, and if most of the rest of the less developed world have similar cultures, in due course they may all, for a while, end up with birth rates like Italy’s. Family policies that have been instituted to rescue the birth rate in those countries have failed so far, in part because they do not address the very difficult task of improving the status of women. These
Table 1 Some contrasting total fertility rates (TFR) around 2012 The West Ireland Iceland New Zealand France UK Sweden Australia USA Norway Finland Belgium Netherlands Lithuania Denmark
Less developed world TFR 2.05 2.04 2.03 2.00 1.91 1.90 1.89 1.89 1.88 1.83 1.81 1.76 1.76 1.73
Source: Eurostat, national statistical yearbooks.
Sri Lanka Nicaragua Karnataka Turkey Vietnam Chile Iran Uzbekistan Brazil Lebanon Kerala Tamil Nadu Thailand China
East Asia TFR 2.17 2.08 2.00 1.99 1.89 1.87 1.87 1.86 1.82 1.76 1.70 1.70 1.66 1.55
Japan S. Korea Taiwan
TFR 1.39 1.23 1.01
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failures, coupled with the evidence of a preference for small families, strongly suggest that China and many other territories in the region have fallen into the ‘Low Fertility Trap’ (Lutz et al. 2006), which means that they are likely to experience prolonged low fertility. As noted elsewhere (Basten and Jiang 2015, this issue), the lack of growth in the population of working age in China (a feature unlikely to change in the foreseeable future) has already led to alarmingly high rates of wage inflation.
Is the fertility of other populations—elsewhere in urban Asia or in the rapidly developing countries of Latin American—likely to fall to the levels of those in China? There is no reason why not. As Table 1 shows, very low fertility outside the ‘global North’ is no longer confined to the rapid-growth economies of Pacific Asia. Emerging (and re-emerging) industrial powerhouses such as Brazil, Vietnam, Thailand, and the southern states of India are now also seeing wellbelow replacement fertility. Since the populations of many of these countries (e.g., China, India, Brazil) are far too big for their future age structures and dependency ratios to be rescued from population ageing by migration (Coleman 2009), it seems likely that policies intended to increase their fertility will be introduced. 4.0
3.5
3.0
TFR
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Prospects for the adoption of pronatalist measures
These may not be described as pronatalist policies because of political and cultural sensitivities. Rather, they might draw on the policy paradigm seen in ‘Old Europe’, where fertility preferences reported in surveys have often been for more than two children and well above actual fertility. Policies have been developed there that seemed likely to help couples meet their preferences. Similar policies might be considered in non-Western countries with a lowfertility problem but their adoption would confront a number of obstacles. Firstly, the rapidity of fertility decline in many of these countries means that demographic momentum is still driving rapid rates of population growth. This and the fact that robust family planning programmes are still fresh in the memory mean that it would be difficult for policymakers to introduce policies that positively encouraged family-building, and that required a radical change in official rhetoric (Jones et al. 2009; Yüksel 2013). Secondly, as Figure 1 shows, the substantial demographic heterogeneity present in many of these countries means that it would be very challenging to develop a population strategy more supportive of childbearing that could be applied nationally. Further, it could prove difficult to distinguish a suite of family-friendly policies intended to help individuals meet their stated preferences from explicitly pronatalist policies based on nationalist ideology of the kind currently seen in Turkey.
2.5
2.0
1.5 India 2013
Indonesia 2010
Mexico 2010
Turkey 2013
Figure 1 Boxplot of distribution of total fertility rate (TFR) by major province/state for India (N = 30), Indonesia (N = 32), Mexico (N = 32), and Turkey (N = 12) Sources: National statistical offices.
Decline of the West
to be possible), it would necessarily be diverting expenditure from education (needed to reap the benefits of the demographic dividend—see below) and from family-friendly policies. Furthermore, current and future low fertility would make it likely that any policies generous enough to be effective would be likely to be in financial deficit given the ever larger dependent population. For example, a 2012 Deutsche Bank report suggests that without reform, the current (inadequate) Chinese pension system could face a shortfall of US$11 trillion, which is much more than the country’s current annual gross domestic product (GDP) of around US$8.2 trillion (Thomas 2013). When such shortfalls are in double digit trillions there is clearly a problem ahead. Economic projections are much more precarious than population projections. However, for what they are worth, economic forecasts put GDP per head in the BRICs and MINTs at not more than 60 per cent and usually more like 50 per cent of Western levels by 2050, with India and Indonesia no more than 30 per cent. It looks as though some will indeed become old before they are rich, China almost certainly will (Figure 2).
Low fertility and social policy There are important linkages between reproductive behaviour and social policy (or its inadequacy) in the rising powers. An example of one such linkage is the inadequate provision for the elderly in China. As well as being a shortcoming in itself, this inadequacy is held to be a key driver in restricting fertility because ‘squeezed’ only-child couples find themselves caring for two sets of parents as well as a child (see Basten and Jiang 2015, this issue). On the other hand, in Thailand, one of the most rapidly ageing populations in the world, elderly parents are increasingly less likely to be cared for by a child, because of low fertility and high levels of out-migration from the areas where the elderly live (Basten et al. 2014a). The prevalence of informal employment is another significant factor. It can mean that the jobs that do exist are frequently insecure and, because of their position outside the regulatory system, the income from them contributes little to the revenue needed by governments for investment in education and other social purposes (Basten 2012). The result is to diminish the capacity of governments to invest in policies that could improve their country’s demographic position or ameliorate the effects of population ageing. With low fertility and without support for the elderly, adult couples might further limit their childbearing to avoid being over-burdened, thus creating a further harmful feedback loop. Alternatively, were a government to invest heavily in social policy for the elderly (if, indeed, tax receipts were sufficient for this Population aged 65 and over per 100 persons aged 15–64
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Qualifying the demographic dividend A further element to consider is the supposed economic benefit to be derived from falling fertility rates, or the so-called demographic dividend. The returns to economic growth promised by a working-
80 70
Japan
Spain Italy
60 50
Korea Germany
France China
40
Canada
Mexico
Australia
Brazil Turkey
30
UK USA
Russia
Indonesia 20
India
10 0 0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
GDP per head, US$1000, Purchasing Power Parity basis
Figure 2 GDP per head (US$1,000 Purchasing Power Parity) and age-dependency ratio, projected to 2050, selected countries Sources: World Bank, UN, PricewaterhouseCoopers.
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age population that is disproportionately larger than the dependent elderly and child population have been widely reported (Bloom et al. 2003). Moreover, it is generally agreed that these favourable demographic circumstances have contributed perhaps one-third of the rapid economic growth of China, South Korea, Brazil, and Thailand. It is therefore tempting, when projecting future fertility declines in the MINTs and across the less developed world, to suggest that as other countries travel through this transitory phase they too will reap the bonus. However, we increasingly see that the bonus is far from automatic. Firstly, Crespo Cuaresma et al. (2014) have argued that ‘after the effect of human capital dynamics is controlled for, no evidence exists that changes in age structure affect labour productivity’, which suggests that the demographic dividend is, largely, an education dividend. Given that sustained, long-term investment in education in lowincome and middle-income countries cannot be guaranteed, it follows that neither can the advantage of the demographic bonus. Secondly, many have observed that a demographic dividend can be squandered either through brain-drain emigration (Williamson 2013) or because of poor growth in the availability of jobs (Basten et al. 2011). Finally, note that the presence of a large, well-educated population of young people who find themselves unable to find adequate employment has been cited by many as a possible precursor to social unrest and political instability (Urdal 2006). In parts of the less developed world, ‘demographic’ transition might only lead to ‘democratic’ transition via political instability, retarding economic and social progress and reducing influence on the world stage (Dyson 2013). The general failure of the ‘Arab Spring’ is often cited as an example.
Institutions and extraneous factors Other impediments to development may prove even more important than the demographic. As noted earlier on, few of the potential world dominators of the future are fully functioning democracies; China and Vietnam remain Communist one-party states, and may well be able to remain so. However, it is characteristic of such societies that they lack mechanisms or incentives to deal with corruption and complaint. Inadequate restraint of corruption by government officials, for example, in land grabs in China, has provoked serious local unrest. Centralized economic policy, lumbering policy change, limited economic freedom, all handicap economic
growth (e.g., the chronic energy shortage in India (Pachauri 2004)). Restrictions on freedom of information inhibit the resolution of health problems. India enjoys the democratic benefits of a free press and judiciary and a lively civil society, but that has not stopped rampant corruption at all levels and the persistence of clientism, subsidized prices, and oppressive bureaucracy amidst high and growing inequality. Forty per cent of Indian children are malnourished (see Guha 2012; LSE IDEAS 2012; Sengupta 2012). Enthusiasts tend to over-state the extent and importance of environmental pollution, but it is difficult to do so in the case of China and India, the world leaders in pollution. In 2007, the World Bank estimated that increased mortality and morbidity from environmental pollution in China cost the country 4.3 per cent of its GDP in 2003, with non-health costs adding a further 1.5 per cent. These costs, though far from crippling, are not negligible, and the pollution puts additional pressure on scarce water resources especially in North China. The OECD (2013) has cited an overall figure of 9 per cent of GDP as the cost of pollution. Political disaffection and civil unrest over urban pollution may be more important than the economic damage. According to an allegation in the Financial Times of 3 July 2007, such concerns lay behind the deletion from the OECD report, at the insistence of the Chinese government, of an estimate of 750,000 annual excess deaths from environmental pollution. There is also the looming threat of climate change and resource stresses. The vulnerability of China’s agricultural sector to climate change has been identified elsewhere (Xiong et al. 2009). In India the slower pace of fertility transition leading to a probable future population of 2 billion may provoke serious resource shortage, especially of water. India has 17 per cent of the world’s population with 4 per cent of its fresh water. Current levels of resource consumption are considered to be unsustainable (Pachauri 2004). The country’s urban population has been projected to grow from 380 million to 600 million by 2030, with energy demand increasing threefold by 2030. These and broader political issues are receiving close attention from scholars (e.g., Littwak 2012; Beardson 2013; Mirsky 2013; Shambaugh 2013).
Conclusions The West’s share of world population, power, and wealth will almost certainly decline, but the demographic outlook is more stable and sustainable than
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Decline of the West supposed (see Reher 2015, this issue). That positive view does not yet apply to all European countries, and the futures of the developed countries of East Asia are obscure. The countries of the Anglosphere and NW Europe are in a favourable position because sustainable fertility levels appear to be returning there. They can reasonably be expected to return elsewhere as Southern and Eastern European societies modernize. With immigration, population replacement has become strongly positive in some countries, although the numerical predominance of immigrant population in cities such as London presents unsolved problems. The non-demographic management of ageing is slowly making progress and most countries have already made successful transitions to demographic and democratic maturity. The less developed world must cope with different problems although these should not be exaggerated in some caricature of the ‘Death of the West’ scenario. Some countries do face extreme and challenging demographic outcomes: low fertility and premature population ageing for many, and for others continued growth to very large population sizes and high population density. In more arid countries and regions, rapid population growth and its demands on water and other resources will interact badly with the deteriorating environment brought on by climate change. In some countries well ahead of adequate levels of economic development, faster transitions from initially higher fertility levels will bring faster ageing.
Note 1. David Coleman is at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford, 32 Wellington Square, Oxford OX2 6QL, UK and St John’s College, Oxford. E-mail: [email protected]. Stuart Basten is at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford and Green Templeton College, Oxford.
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Population Studies, 2015 Vol. 69, No. S1, S107–S118, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2014.970401
The Death of the West: An alternative view David Coleman and Stuart Basten
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University of Oxford
Much has been written about the ‘Death of the West’, a demise threatened by the low level of reproduction in Western countries. That fate is contrasted unfavourably with the rapid growth of the populations and economies of less developed countries, and the prospect of the numerical and political marginalization of the formerly dominant developed world. We believe that trends in European fertility have been misunderstood and that, with effort and some pain, their consequences for age structure are manageable. Many European societies also enjoy the advantages of demographic and social maturity, the resilience of established consensual democratic institutions, the rule of law, and civil society. The sizes of China and India raise problems of resource sustainability and vulnerability to climate change. China risks falling into a low-fertility trap, reinforced by urban working conditions unfriendly to family formation. Traditional patriarchal and familist cultures may depress fertility rates to unhelpfully low levels in other less developed countries.
Keywords: low fertility; population ageing; population decline; geopolitical marginalization; BRICS; China; India
Introduction In recent years, much has been written about the ‘Death of the West’, its proximate cause of ‘demographic malnutrition’, and the underlying problem of its ‘defective values’ (Buchanan 2002). In these respects ‘The West’ is best exemplified by ‘Old Europe’, according to the diagnosis being made from the safer shores of North America, especially by some notably ideological critics (e.g., Steyn 2006; Laqueur 2007). There, an extensive literature points out that Europe is irretrievably shrinking on the world stage (Longman 2004; Wattenberg 2004). The continent’s perceived preference for welfare over production and for secularism over religion apparently brings with it a ‘catastrophic’ failure of reproduction. In the view of some of these authors, low birth rates bring unsustainable levels of population ageing and decline which only an inflow of more vigorous immigrants can moderate, an inflow that will create a hostile Islamized society unfriendly to what is left of European civilization (Last 2013). Some of this critique is supported by the blunt facts of low period fertility and projections of decline and ageing for many of Europe’s countries (Winter and Teitelbaum 2013). Other elements, however, form part of a rather enjoyable but somewhat tabloid ‘demographic
© 2015 Population Investigation Committee
disaster’ scenario, viewed with mixed sympathy and schadenfreude from across the Atlantic. Certainly, it is clear that the global demographic future is not European, nor in the longer run does it belong to the USA. Most population projections allot about 7 per cent of the world’s population to Europe by 2050, against the 25 per cent or so that was its share in the late nineteenth century. That permanent shift in population balance arises fundamentally from the earlier demographic transition in the ‘West’ and the century-long interval before the later transition elsewhere. In the West, natural increase and demographic momentum are exhausted or nearly so, while both remain vigorous in much of the rest of the world. Deaths have exceeded births in Germany since 1972, in Italy since 1993, and in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and much of Eastern Europe since at least 1996. Immigration has prevented overall population decline in Italy but only intermittently in Germany, which first experienced population decline in 1974 and then again from 2004 until 2011. Population in Russia and much of Eastern Europe has been in decline for two decades or more, being halted in Russia only from 2012. Some Eastern European countries, such as Bulgaria, are projected to decline by 40 per cent or more by 2060 (UNPD 2013). The population of the
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European Union continues to grow but only by adding the inhabitants of demographically ‘weak’ new member countries that have lower fertility, and higher rates of mortality and emigration than existing members. The USA (along with Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, together with the UK as a group of countries known as the ‘Anglosphere’ (Bennett 2007)) grows by adding people through its own natural increase and by attracting immigrants from around the world. Population ageing, following inevitably from controlled fertility and, later on, from longer life, compounds this apparent enfeeblement. Not only, then, is the demographic diminution of Europe, and the ‘West’ more broadly, clearly in sight but so is the prospect of its older populations being weakened economically and becoming arguably less innovative and vigorous. Purely economic challenges to pensions systems and elderly care are serious enough (Bloom et al. 2011), imposing new burdens on the working population and ending the expectation that each new generation will be better off than its parents. Barring unexpected checks, increases in expectation of life may be considerably greater than forecast according to some innovative analyses (Ediev 2011). Many argue (e.g., Skirbekk 2008) that an older workforce is inherently less productive and innovative, echoing the earlier pessimism of Sauvy (1966). These developments will have further malign consequences. Austerity measures to sustain pensions may challenge established democratic institutions (Cincotta 2012). Some claim, controversially, that collective action and solidarity in Western countries may be weakened by the growth of poorly integrated minorities (Collier 2013; Goodhart 2013). Military security, energy security, and geopolitical influence will all be lost or weakened, with Europe losing ground to the USA, and the USA losing ground to the rest (Last 2013). The West, history makers for the last two centuries or more, will become history takers as the economic and political and possibly global cultural future passes to the growing and increasingly rich populations of China (Jacques 2012), India and the rest of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, and South Africa) and MINTs (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Turkey) will dominate the world population and economy. Believing that both sides of this argument are, in truth, a bit overdone, this paper explores two propositions that moderate the scenario of a stark dichotomous future of failing ‘Old Europe’ and the runaway success of BRICS, MINTs, and others. Firstly, we suggest that the fertility trends underpinning European society are not terminal but
reversible. With effort and some pain, their age structure consequences are manageable, although Southern and Eastern European countries face particular cultural and institutional disadvantages (Lesthaeghe and Permanyer 2014). Secondly, we propose that the enthusiastic endorsement of a new world order generated by current low- and middleincome countries ignores a number of impediments, not the least being demographic problems.
Escaping from the low-fertility trap In support of the first proposition, evidence accumulating over some years now permits a more upbeat view of ‘Western’ birth rates. The public, journalists, and even some academics have become a little mesmerized by the constant repetition of talk of ‘Europe’s falling birth rate’. However, for many years now, especially in the Western part of the continent, the birth rate has been doing no such thing, not even by the uncertain indicator of period total fertility. Instead, average total fertility in Western Europe has been edging up slightly since the 1980s. While growth in Northern Europe has been strong (albeit from a lower minimum), even Eastern and Southern European birth rates have crept up slowly from their ‘lowest-low’ nadir (Billari and Kohler 2004). Since the late 1990s the deflating effects of delay in births on the total fertility measure has become well recognized (Bongaarts and Feeney 1998); fertility was not, in many cases, as low as it seemed. If women were to produce the average two or more children that successive surveys suggested they desired, postponement had to end. That now appears to have happened in many European countries (Bongaarts and Sobotka 2012). Total fertility has risen to levels not seen since the 1970s in France (2.0), the UK (1.9), and other NW European countries. Family policy may have had a role here, intentionally or otherwise. There are indications that both period and cohort fertility may rise further. Myrskylä et al. (2009) point to an apparent reversal, from 1975 to 2008, of the trend for fertility to fall with rising values of the Human Development Index (HDI), appearing to indicate that further development encouraged a rise in birth rates, just as classical economics always suggested it should. However, that study has been criticized on various grounds (Harttgen and Vollmer 2014; Lesthaeghe and Permanyer 2014; Luci-Greulich and Thévenon 2014). The claimed effect, according to critics, is mostly driven by higher fertility at older
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Decline of the West ages of women, and facilitated by favourable trends in income and gender equality, complementing the recuperation hypothesis (Myrskylä et al. 2011). The story is complex and mixed. The spread of higher education among women is a crucial component of development. Generally, women graduates have children later (Ní Bhrolcháin and Beaujouan 2012) and have lower than average overall fertility, notably in German-speaking countries. There, life is made difficult for working mothers by such adverse institutional arrangements as schools that close at lunchtime, shops with limited opening times, and the reluctance of employers to offer part-time work. Elsewhere the fertility-depressing effect of education is weak and may be reversing. Women graduates delay childbearing and often remain childless, but are also more likely to progress from a first to a second and further birth (Klesment and Puur 2013). Looking to the future, these upward trends are expected to continue, despite the check to the birth rate presented by the economic recession since 2008 in most Western countries. Only a few countries (e.g., France) have escaped this check. Given the favourable trends in the major determinants of the birth rate in developed countries noted above, cohort fertility is projected to increase in most countries, albeit from low levels in some (Myrskylä et al. 2013). Recent Eastern European immigrants to the UK have remarkably high period fertility (Dormon 2014). While that might just be the usual transient ‘immigration effect’ on fertility (Toulemon 2004), or a selection effect, it may also indicate that there is nothing intrinsic about the current low fertility in Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, and elsewhere and that economic and policy reform, and cultural change in those countries might eventually promote a substantial fertility increase. Moreover, population reproduction (the extent to which the population maintains or increases its size across generations) is now much less dependent solely upon natural increase. Developed countries, except those of Eastern Europe and East Asia, receive large immigrant inflows, wanted and unwanted, from non-Western countries. These immigrants and their natural increase take overall levels of population reproduction well above replacement in some richer countries, contributing to a renewal of substantial rates of population growth and changing its ethnic composition. Thus, while certainly not without its challenges, international migration is the chief element in the population dynamics of many countries (Ediev et al. 2013; Wilson et al. 2013). It can moderate population ageing somewhat and may strengthen the resources of the labour force.
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These demographic trends and the forces that underlie them suggest that the popular pessimistic scenario for ‘The West’ may be misplaced. That is not to say that problems relating to low fertility, population ageing, and the rest can be ignored—far from it—especially in those countries, notably in Central and Eastern Europe, that remain in a chronically worse condition than others. Nonetheless, the purely demographic outlook for population ageing seems to be rather more favourable than once thought. The West will not disappear nor die of old age. While it seems unlikely that in many countries total fertility itself will rise to replacement levels, it is widely believed that population ageing can be managed by non-demographic measures as long as total fertility remains above a ‘safe limit’ variously interpreted as 1.7 or 1.5 (McDonald 2006). Some analyses go further, claiming that sub-replacement fertility is optimal for welfare when education is factored into the age structure and the dependency ratio. Education imposes costs but an educated workforce is much more productive (Lutz et al. 2012; Striessnig and Lutz 2013). New measures and analyses of population ageing such as ‘prospective ageing’, based on the number of years left to live rather than chronological age, give a much more favourable picture of the current and future burden of dependency (Sanderson and Scherbov 2010). Moreover, Western populations have enjoyed high levels of education and health for generations. Thanks to that, cognitive powers of older cohorts, on various measures, are superior to those of the same age among the emerging powers, extending health and the capacity to work later into life. Indices of ageing weighted by cognitive functioning equalize or even reverse the rank order of population ageing between the West and some of the emerging powers, with the USA and Northern Europe emerging with the lowest burden (Skirbekk et al. 2012). The slow process of cohort replacement would preserve any such advantage for many years. Furthermore, non-demographic considerations put the overall position of the West in a better light (Morris 2010). For example, demographic gloom has been greatly encouraged by the habit of assuming the permanence of traditional fixed age limits for workforce entry, workforce departure, and overall participation. That is quite absurd. It suggests the absence of institutional or personal adaptations to longer life and to the costs of longer retirement, but in fact adaptations have been occurring. Despite understandable popular opposition and resistance from vested interests, ages of entitlement to pensions, for example,
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are being forced upwards by government action, in some cases formally in line with increase in life expectation (Italy and Sweden) and by the reaction of individuals to the prospect of inadequate pensions. The West is at least becoming old after it has become rich, not before. Harsh austerity measures in response to the economic crisis have accelerated these necessary adaptations. A dependency ratio that is more favourable than expected does not remove the certainty of much larger numbers of older people in the future, of an age vulnerable to physical handicap and dementia. However, set against that prospect are upward trends in the proportion of a longer age span spent in healthy life in many countries (not all) and the slower than expected increase in the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease (20 per cent lower in the UK, for example, than projected in the past) possibly as a result of the same social and economic advances noted earlier (Christensen et al. 2013; Matthews et al. 2013). Finally, for all their undoubted ills, European and other Western societies enjoy some advantages of demographic and social maturity which enhance their resilience and stability. Demographic and democratic transitions and social, economic, and educational developments have been slow and have kept pace with each other, leading to relatively stable demographic and political regimes. Many European societies possess long-term established and consensual democratic institutions, respect for the rule of law, and a complex civil society linking individuals and groups in many ways (Almond and Verba 1989). Whatever the new problems of social fission arising from immigration, most societies have put behind them ancestral divisions of tribe and language. Trust tends to be relatively high. For the most part, gesellschaft has replaced gemeinschaft. Perceptions of a common citizenship help to sustain welfare consensus in a way that kin-based smaller-scale communities find more difficult. Culture and institutions matter in determining the success and failure of nations (Landes 1998; Lipset and Lenz 2000; Harrison 2006; Acemoglu and Robinson 2013). Moreover, looking to the larger scale and the longer term, most climate change scenarios, although beneficial for few, do not locate the biggest challenges in ‘Western’ countries and two of the biggest—Russia and Canada—could enjoy some environmental benefits.
The view from the South Demographically and economically, the rise to predominance of Asia, Latin America, and, perhaps
later, Africa, would seem to be inevitable. That is obviously true of population size, and will apply to the growth of economic, political, and military power if the effects of numbers are magnified by economic growth. As non-Western economies develop, a great re-equilibration is in progress, tending to reverse the ‘great divergence’ of the eighteenth century (Pomeranz 2000). The consequences will go far beyond restoring the balance of power and wealth between East and West to its position in the seventeenth century. Europe will henceforth comprise scarcely 7 per cent of the global population instead of its historical peak of 25 per cent in the eighteenth century. Furthermore, modern communications and globalization will enable any future dominant powers of the ‘global South’ to exercise much more power globally than was possible in previous centuries. In those days, the inhabitants of some continents were unaware even of the existence of some other continents. Are those critics right, then, who see Europe’s future demographic marginalization confining it henceforth to the sidelines, even if it can survive its internal demographic problems? In fact, the future may not be as one-sidedly in favour of non-Western countries as this scenario suggests. The very speed of the demographic transitions in these countries—at least in mortality—compared with that of the West has made them vulnerable to instabilities and contradictions that may take decades to resolve. The speed of their economic transitions is often unmatched by adjustments in society, culture, and political institutions. The nature of their cultures is often inimical to rapid adjustment. Moreover, in some cases the very fact of their large populations and fast population growth poses intractable social and economic problems. With these issues in mind, we devote the remainder of the paper to reasons for caution in making assumptions about the role played by demography in shaping the future supremacy of BRICS and MINTs.
Low fertility and rapid ageing The most intriguing possibility is that the birth rate might fall in many of these populations to a level lower than that in much of Europe and the USA, leading to substantial population ageing before the economy becomes mature enough to sustain the cost of the ageing. Almost everywhere fertility is falling. Half the world’s populations now live in countries where the birth rate is below replacement, including Brazil, Iran, Turkey, and the southern half of India,
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Decline of the West although these countries have decades of momentum growth still to come (e.g., for Asia, see Basten, forthcoming). Some may face decades of subreplacement fertility (Brazil, Iran, Thailand, Indonesia), an experience already familiar in China. Russia’s recent fertility revival, meanwhile, has been dismissed as a temporary tempo shift (Frejka and Zakharov 2013), its diminished population only kept afloat by immigration, elements of which are unlikely to contribute to its political or social stability. Table 1 shows how birth rates in some less developed countries have already fallen below some in the West. In both East-Asian (and some South-East) settings, there is significant pessimism about the chance of a reversal of fertility trends. This is shared by demographers (Frejka et al. 2010; Basten et al. 2014a), social policy specialists (Sun 2012; Song et al. 2013), and specialists in local statistical offices (Basten 2013a), all of whom assume stagnation in fertility rates in the medium term in the absence of some major policy shifts. That assumption is supported by the cohort projections of Myrskylä et al. (2013), which offer little expectation of recovery in these countries in the short run. Another source of pessimistic expectations are the structural impediments that help sustain ultra-low fertility rates: an inadequate improvement in the status of women; the high direct costs of childcare and opportunity costs of childbearing; child-unfriendly cities; weak state support for childbearing; and long working hours. The effect of these impediments has been reinforced by decades of frequently aggressive (and, in the case of China, coercive) family planning programmes.
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Furthermore, in what appears to be the development of a new paradigm, fertility preferences in a number of major East and South East Asian territories are being reported more frequently as being (well) below replacement—and falling. In both Hong Kong and Taiwan, the most recent surveys report ideal family sizes of between 1.5 and 1.8, while in China a number of studies have identified a prevailing preference for a one-child family in urban areas and, increasingly, in rural areas (Basten 2013b; Basten and Jiang 2015, this issue). Outside East Asia, in Thailand the ideal family size is just 1.9 (UNFPA 2011) and in (urban) India, among the quintile with the highest education and income, up to 25 per cent of women desire only a one-child family, with respondents reporting that there is no social stigma attached to this choice (Basu and Desai 2010). Cultural patterns that promote low fertility may be very widespread in modernizing societies in the less developed world. Patriarchal familist societies, those in which family and kin obligations dominate social life, tend to have low fertility when modernizing, not least because of the extra burdens usually placed on women. The low birth rates in Southern Europe and East Asia are examples. If these familist cultures engender low birth rates as they modernize, and if most of the rest of the less developed world have similar cultures, in due course they may all, for a while, end up with birth rates like Italy’s. Family policies that have been instituted to rescue the birth rate in those countries have failed so far, in part because they do not address the very difficult task of improving the status of women. These
Table 1 Some contrasting total fertility rates (TFR) around 2012 The West Ireland Iceland New Zealand France UK Sweden Australia USA Norway Finland Belgium Netherlands Lithuania Denmark
Less developed world TFR 2.05 2.04 2.03 2.00 1.91 1.90 1.89 1.89 1.88 1.83 1.81 1.76 1.76 1.73
Source: Eurostat, national statistical yearbooks.
Sri Lanka Nicaragua Karnataka Turkey Vietnam Chile Iran Uzbekistan Brazil Lebanon Kerala Tamil Nadu Thailand China
East Asia TFR 2.17 2.08 2.00 1.99 1.89 1.87 1.87 1.86 1.82 1.76 1.70 1.70 1.66 1.55
Japan S. Korea Taiwan
TFR 1.39 1.23 1.01
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failures, coupled with the evidence of a preference for small families, strongly suggest that China and many other territories in the region have fallen into the ‘Low Fertility Trap’ (Lutz et al. 2006), which means that they are likely to experience prolonged low fertility. As noted elsewhere (Basten and Jiang 2015, this issue), the lack of growth in the population of working age in China (a feature unlikely to change in the foreseeable future) has already led to alarmingly high rates of wage inflation.
Is the fertility of other populations—elsewhere in urban Asia or in the rapidly developing countries of Latin American—likely to fall to the levels of those in China? There is no reason why not. As Table 1 shows, very low fertility outside the ‘global North’ is no longer confined to the rapid-growth economies of Pacific Asia. Emerging (and re-emerging) industrial powerhouses such as Brazil, Vietnam, Thailand, and the southern states of India are now also seeing wellbelow replacement fertility. Since the populations of many of these countries (e.g., China, India, Brazil) are far too big for their future age structures and dependency ratios to be rescued from population ageing by migration (Coleman 2009), it seems likely that policies intended to increase their fertility will be introduced. 4.0
3.5
3.0
TFR
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Prospects for the adoption of pronatalist measures
These may not be described as pronatalist policies because of political and cultural sensitivities. Rather, they might draw on the policy paradigm seen in ‘Old Europe’, where fertility preferences reported in surveys have often been for more than two children and well above actual fertility. Policies have been developed there that seemed likely to help couples meet their preferences. Similar policies might be considered in non-Western countries with a lowfertility problem but their adoption would confront a number of obstacles. Firstly, the rapidity of fertility decline in many of these countries means that demographic momentum is still driving rapid rates of population growth. This and the fact that robust family planning programmes are still fresh in the memory mean that it would be difficult for policymakers to introduce policies that positively encouraged family-building, and that required a radical change in official rhetoric (Jones et al. 2009; Yüksel 2013). Secondly, as Figure 1 shows, the substantial demographic heterogeneity present in many of these countries means that it would be very challenging to develop a population strategy more supportive of childbearing that could be applied nationally. Further, it could prove difficult to distinguish a suite of family-friendly policies intended to help individuals meet their stated preferences from explicitly pronatalist policies based on nationalist ideology of the kind currently seen in Turkey.
2.5
2.0
1.5 India 2013
Indonesia 2010
Mexico 2010
Turkey 2013
Figure 1 Boxplot of distribution of total fertility rate (TFR) by major province/state for India (N = 30), Indonesia (N = 32), Mexico (N = 32), and Turkey (N = 12) Sources: National statistical offices.
Decline of the West
to be possible), it would necessarily be diverting expenditure from education (needed to reap the benefits of the demographic dividend—see below) and from family-friendly policies. Furthermore, current and future low fertility would make it likely that any policies generous enough to be effective would be likely to be in financial deficit given the ever larger dependent population. For example, a 2012 Deutsche Bank report suggests that without reform, the current (inadequate) Chinese pension system could face a shortfall of US$11 trillion, which is much more than the country’s current annual gross domestic product (GDP) of around US$8.2 trillion (Thomas 2013). When such shortfalls are in double digit trillions there is clearly a problem ahead. Economic projections are much more precarious than population projections. However, for what they are worth, economic forecasts put GDP per head in the BRICs and MINTs at not more than 60 per cent and usually more like 50 per cent of Western levels by 2050, with India and Indonesia no more than 30 per cent. It looks as though some will indeed become old before they are rich, China almost certainly will (Figure 2).
Low fertility and social policy There are important linkages between reproductive behaviour and social policy (or its inadequacy) in the rising powers. An example of one such linkage is the inadequate provision for the elderly in China. As well as being a shortcoming in itself, this inadequacy is held to be a key driver in restricting fertility because ‘squeezed’ only-child couples find themselves caring for two sets of parents as well as a child (see Basten and Jiang 2015, this issue). On the other hand, in Thailand, one of the most rapidly ageing populations in the world, elderly parents are increasingly less likely to be cared for by a child, because of low fertility and high levels of out-migration from the areas where the elderly live (Basten et al. 2014a). The prevalence of informal employment is another significant factor. It can mean that the jobs that do exist are frequently insecure and, because of their position outside the regulatory system, the income from them contributes little to the revenue needed by governments for investment in education and other social purposes (Basten 2012). The result is to diminish the capacity of governments to invest in policies that could improve their country’s demographic position or ameliorate the effects of population ageing. With low fertility and without support for the elderly, adult couples might further limit their childbearing to avoid being over-burdened, thus creating a further harmful feedback loop. Alternatively, were a government to invest heavily in social policy for the elderly (if, indeed, tax receipts were sufficient for this Population aged 65 and over per 100 persons aged 15–64
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Qualifying the demographic dividend A further element to consider is the supposed economic benefit to be derived from falling fertility rates, or the so-called demographic dividend. The returns to economic growth promised by a working-
80 70
Japan
Spain Italy
60 50
Korea Germany
France China
40
Canada
Mexico
Australia
Brazil Turkey
30
UK USA
Russia
Indonesia 20
India
10 0 0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
GDP per head, US$1000, Purchasing Power Parity basis
Figure 2 GDP per head (US$1,000 Purchasing Power Parity) and age-dependency ratio, projected to 2050, selected countries Sources: World Bank, UN, PricewaterhouseCoopers.
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age population that is disproportionately larger than the dependent elderly and child population have been widely reported (Bloom et al. 2003). Moreover, it is generally agreed that these favourable demographic circumstances have contributed perhaps one-third of the rapid economic growth of China, South Korea, Brazil, and Thailand. It is therefore tempting, when projecting future fertility declines in the MINTs and across the less developed world, to suggest that as other countries travel through this transitory phase they too will reap the bonus. However, we increasingly see that the bonus is far from automatic. Firstly, Crespo Cuaresma et al. (2014) have argued that ‘after the effect of human capital dynamics is controlled for, no evidence exists that changes in age structure affect labour productivity’, which suggests that the demographic dividend is, largely, an education dividend. Given that sustained, long-term investment in education in lowincome and middle-income countries cannot be guaranteed, it follows that neither can the advantage of the demographic bonus. Secondly, many have observed that a demographic dividend can be squandered either through brain-drain emigration (Williamson 2013) or because of poor growth in the availability of jobs (Basten et al. 2011). Finally, note that the presence of a large, well-educated population of young people who find themselves unable to find adequate employment has been cited by many as a possible precursor to social unrest and political instability (Urdal 2006). In parts of the less developed world, ‘demographic’ transition might only lead to ‘democratic’ transition via political instability, retarding economic and social progress and reducing influence on the world stage (Dyson 2013). The general failure of the ‘Arab Spring’ is often cited as an example.
Institutions and extraneous factors Other impediments to development may prove even more important than the demographic. As noted earlier on, few of the potential world dominators of the future are fully functioning democracies; China and Vietnam remain Communist one-party states, and may well be able to remain so. However, it is characteristic of such societies that they lack mechanisms or incentives to deal with corruption and complaint. Inadequate restraint of corruption by government officials, for example, in land grabs in China, has provoked serious local unrest. Centralized economic policy, lumbering policy change, limited economic freedom, all handicap economic
growth (e.g., the chronic energy shortage in India (Pachauri 2004)). Restrictions on freedom of information inhibit the resolution of health problems. India enjoys the democratic benefits of a free press and judiciary and a lively civil society, but that has not stopped rampant corruption at all levels and the persistence of clientism, subsidized prices, and oppressive bureaucracy amidst high and growing inequality. Forty per cent of Indian children are malnourished (see Guha 2012; LSE IDEAS 2012; Sengupta 2012). Enthusiasts tend to over-state the extent and importance of environmental pollution, but it is difficult to do so in the case of China and India, the world leaders in pollution. In 2007, the World Bank estimated that increased mortality and morbidity from environmental pollution in China cost the country 4.3 per cent of its GDP in 2003, with non-health costs adding a further 1.5 per cent. These costs, though far from crippling, are not negligible, and the pollution puts additional pressure on scarce water resources especially in North China. The OECD (2013) has cited an overall figure of 9 per cent of GDP as the cost of pollution. Political disaffection and civil unrest over urban pollution may be more important than the economic damage. According to an allegation in the Financial Times of 3 July 2007, such concerns lay behind the deletion from the OECD report, at the insistence of the Chinese government, of an estimate of 750,000 annual excess deaths from environmental pollution. There is also the looming threat of climate change and resource stresses. The vulnerability of China’s agricultural sector to climate change has been identified elsewhere (Xiong et al. 2009). In India the slower pace of fertility transition leading to a probable future population of 2 billion may provoke serious resource shortage, especially of water. India has 17 per cent of the world’s population with 4 per cent of its fresh water. Current levels of resource consumption are considered to be unsustainable (Pachauri 2004). The country’s urban population has been projected to grow from 380 million to 600 million by 2030, with energy demand increasing threefold by 2030. These and broader political issues are receiving close attention from scholars (e.g., Littwak 2012; Beardson 2013; Mirsky 2013; Shambaugh 2013).
Conclusions The West’s share of world population, power, and wealth will almost certainly decline, but the demographic outlook is more stable and sustainable than
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Decline of the West supposed (see Reher 2015, this issue). That positive view does not yet apply to all European countries, and the futures of the developed countries of East Asia are obscure. The countries of the Anglosphere and NW Europe are in a favourable position because sustainable fertility levels appear to be returning there. They can reasonably be expected to return elsewhere as Southern and Eastern European societies modernize. With immigration, population replacement has become strongly positive in some countries, although the numerical predominance of immigrant population in cities such as London presents unsolved problems. The non-demographic management of ageing is slowly making progress and most countries have already made successful transitions to demographic and democratic maturity. The less developed world must cope with different problems although these should not be exaggerated in some caricature of the ‘Death of the West’ scenario. Some countries do face extreme and challenging demographic outcomes: low fertility and premature population ageing for many, and for others continued growth to very large population sizes and high population density. In more arid countries and regions, rapid population growth and its demands on water and other resources will interact badly with the deteriorating environment brought on by climate change. In some countries well ahead of adequate levels of economic development, faster transitions from initially higher fertility levels will bring faster ageing.
Note 1. David Coleman is at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford, 32 Wellington Square, Oxford OX2 6QL, UK and St John’s College, Oxford. E-mail: [email protected]. Stuart Basten is at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford and Green Templeton College, Oxford.
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