I’ve run across some information about the Indian and Chinese population demographics which presents some long term problems for them…and potentially for us in some ways too. Both of these countries have been striving to control huge increasing populations…in some cases draconian tactics (such as enforced abortions, etc.) have been used to cut this growth. In other cases the ‘one child’ policy has reaped some simplistic, short term rewards. But as this continues both of these countries might have some quite difficult demographic challenges to deal with…
India’s Worsening Gender Imbalance
http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/04/27/indias-worsening-gender-imbalance
We’ve written a lot about gender on this blog, and the preference for boys over girls has been a hallmark of Asian societies for centuries. This has led to large gender imbalances across much of Asia, particularly in China and India. In China, there are 119 boys born for every 100 girls. According to India’s recently completed census, among children six and under, there are only 914 girls counted for every 1,000 boys.
Natural sex rates lead to a more even sex ratio at birth, suggesting gendercide, i.e. that female fetuses are being aborted. China’s one-child policy has also exacerbated the problem since it was implemented in 1980. But while the gender imbalance has stabilized in China, it’s widening in India, and is at its worst since record-keeping began in 1947.
Harvard economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen was one of the first to bring serious attention to this issue in the early 1990s. Today, researchers are worried that large swaths of unmarried men from China’s most rural provinces.
China faces growing gender imbalance
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8451289.stm
More than 24 million Chinese men of marrying age could find themselves without spouses by 2020, says the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
The gender imbalance among newborns is the most serious demographic problem for the country’s population of 1.3 billion, says the academy.
It cites sex-specific abortions as a major factor, due to China’s traditional bias towards male children.
China may grow old before it grows rich
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/28/china-ageing-population-migrant-labourers
One in five of the world’s population is Chinese, a statistic that has generated a number of bad jokes and, more importantly, the unavoidable weight of a rising China in the world. In few other countries have the questions of how many people there are, and where and how they live mattered more for public policy.
Last November, 6 million census workers interviewed 400 million households in China in the country’s sixth national census. The first results, released by the National Bureau of Statistics, reveal a rapidly ageing, male-dominated population that continues to expand – up 5.7% since 1990 to 1.339 billion, that is considerably better educated at tertiary level than a decade ago and, for the first time in Chinese history, is on the edge of becoming predominantly urban. The census results are both a map of three decades of profound social and economic change in China, and a signpost for the future.
Clearly visible in these latest census results are the trends that informed China’s 12th five-year plan, published earlier this year: first, that the day is in sight when China will run out of the cheap labour that has fuelled its growth in the past three decades; second, that the gender imbalance is worryingly large, the result of a preference for an only son over an only daughter; and third, that the burden of caring for a growing population of elderly citizens, in what is the world’s most rapidly ageing population, will inevitably fall on a shrinking proportion of the economically active.
