Plagues and the Paradox of Progress by Thomas J. Bollyky

Author:Thomas J. Bollyky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Plagues; infectious diseases; noncommunicable diseases; international development; emerging economies; population; urbanization; migration; global health; pandemic; virus; microbe; global poverty; youth bulge; epidemic; supergerm; foreign aid; parasite; germ; cancer; diabetes; heart disease; obesity; NCDs; vaccine; international health; public health; colonialism; conquest; cities; demographic dividend; international development; trade; Ethiopia; South Africa; China; Kenya; Bangladesh; Dhaka; Niger; Agadez; Ireland; Irish famine; measles; smallpox; tuberculosis; cholera; meningitis; polio; HIV; AIDS; malaria; vaccination; antibiotic; eradication
Publisher: The MIT Press

The (Potential) Dividends of Demography

David Bloom, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, has spent his career thinking about how population and the economy interact. He and his colleagues have shown in several research studies that the relevant way to think about the role of population in spurring economic growth isn’t size but age structure.

Nations with a disproportionate share of working-age adults, which Bloom defines as 15 to 64 years old, have an economic advantage. This demographic dividend, as he calls it, exists because that age structure means there are more potential workers to produce income and create things, with fewer dependents (children and the elderly) to consume them. While some readers might quibble with where Bloom and other demographers draw the line to define old or working age, China provides compelling evidence for Bloom’s overall argument.

Starting in 1949, China dramatically reduced infectious disease and improved child survival, but its high birth rates did not initially fall. Mao promoted high birth rates and “national motherhood” in the early 1950s as a strategy to fuel economic and agricultural growth and possibly as a hedge against the threat of nuclear weapons and the deaths that would accompany their use. The Ministry of Health embraced birth planning in 1955, but the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution interrupted the implementation of these programs. The birth rate declined in the mid-1950s, rose for most of the next decade, but started to fall sharply in the early 1970s. With more children surviving, Chinese mothers no longer needed to have so many of them. China also resorted to draconian measures to reduce its birth rate (which was already slowing), pushing women toward sterilization and brutally enforcing a one-child policy.45 As many as a third of the tens of millions of people who died during China’s Great Famine were infants.46 The combination of these factors meant that more people born in the 1950s and mid-1960s survived into adulthood while fewer children followed in the subsequent decades. This resulted in a disproportionately large number of working-age adults, ready to take the low-wage manufacturing jobs that the 1978 economic reforms brought to China.

By 2000, people 15 to 64 years old represented more than two-thirds of the population in the East Asian region. Bloom and his coauthors estimate that one-third to one-half of the spectacular economic growth in China and other East Asian nations during this miraculous time can be attributed to the demographic dividend.47 In a 1994 essay in Foreign Affairs, “The Myth of Asia’s Miracle,” economist and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman also attributed much of the remarkable economic growth in the region to added inputs of labor, rather than a surge in productivity.48 Similarly, the economist Robert Gordon argued that the dramatic decline in infant mortality between 1890 and 1950 is “one of the most important single facts in the history of American economic growth.”49 Most of the countries that achieved sustained economic booms over the last fifty years have had large and growing shares of working-age adults.

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