Category: Family Planning

Forbes: Russian Demography and the Difficulty of Prediction

Editors

MARK ADOMANIS, ‘The Russia Hand’ at FORBES who has recently highlighted an improvement in Russian demographics, writes today:

While perusing the always-excellent Beyond BRICS, a site which I strongly recommend to anyone with an interest in Russia and Eastern Europe, I came across a post directly relevant to one of my real passions and interests: Russian demography. The post highlights some of the country’s recent demographic good news while remaining decidedly skeptical about its future:  READ MORE.

AP: Iran Urges Baby Boom

Editors

NASSER KARIMI writes at the ASSOCIATED PRESS:

Iran’s new message to parents: Get busy and have babies.

In a major reversal of once far-reaching family planning policies, authorities are now slashing its birth-control programs in an attempt to avoid an aging demographic similar to many Western countries that are struggling to keep up with state medical and social security costs.

The changes — announced in Iranian media last week — came after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei described the country’s wide-ranging contraceptive services as “wrong.” The independent Shargh newspaper quoted Mohammad Esmail Motlaq, a Health Ministry official, as saying family planning programs have been cut from the budget for the current Iranian year, which began in March.

It’s still unclear, however, whether the high-level appeals for bigger families will translate into a new population spike. Iran’s economy is stumbling under a combination of international sanctions, inflation and double-digit unemployment. Many young people, particularly in Tehran and other large cities, are postponing marriage or keeping their families small because of the uncertainties. READ MORE.

LA Times: Beyond 7 Billion

Editors

KENNETH R. WEISS at THE LOS ANGELES TIMES explores the Population Boom in a five-part series:

After remaining stable for most of human history, the world’s population has exploded over the last two centuries. The boom is not over: The biggest generation in history is just entering its childbearing years. The coming wave will reshape the planet, and the impact will be greatest in the poorest, most unstable countries.

Part 1: The biggest generation

CFR: China’s Population Policy—An Exchange Between Edwin Winckler and Yanzhong Huang

Editors

FROM THE COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS:

Dr. Yanzhong Huang is Senior Fellow for Global Health and the newest writer for Asia Unbound. His first post, “Time for China to Abandon Its Population Control Policy,” attracted significant attention, including a thoughtful response from Edwin A. Winckler, a Senior Research Scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. Here we have posted both Dr. Winckler’s commentary and a new response from Dr. Huang. We hope you enjoy their discussion.

Elizabeth Economy, C.V. Starr Senior Fellow and Director for Asia Studies

Time for China to ADJUST Its Reproductive Policies By Edwin A. Winckler

As someone who in the early 2000s actively researched PRC birth planning, I found the recent post by the fine scholar Professor Yanzhong Huang a little disappointing. Relative to my experience and research, his main points are basically correct, but imprecise in some details, in ways that obscure important potential lessons, not only about PRC population policy in particular but also about PRC governance in general. Probably in many cases Professor Huang knows better and would be more precise in a longer presentation. However, as presented, his post misses an opportunity to correct what I consider misunderstandings of current PRC birth policy that repeatedly arise in media reporting and American discussion. Moreover, he flatly asserts interpretations that deserve further research as questions, not apparently settled conclusions. This post raises some of those questions. (I personally am no longer actively researching PRC birth policy, but I did discuss some of these issues with various kinds of PRC scholars during a June 2012 visit to Beijing .) READ MORE.

China: Structural Imbalances in Population

Editors

MU GUANGZONG, a professor of demography at Peking University, writes in the China Daily that a decline in the country’s birth rate “may lead to a structural collapse of the population” and that “taking care of the elderly has become an unbearable pressure for some young adults.”

Guangzong’s article begins here:

The nation’s low birthrate is an increasingly severe problem that will accelerate the aging of the population, increase the pension shortfall, and aggravate the gender imbalance.

According to statistics from the Sixth National Census released in April 2011, the country’s birthrate in the past decade has become one of the lowest in the world.

In 1979, youngsters under the age of 14 accounted for one-third of the total population, but by 2010, they accounted for less than 16.6 percent. The family planning authorities are worried about a baby boom if they relax the family planning policy. However, a no-birth culture has become popular among young people of marriageable age who were born in the 1980s and 1990s.

According to a survey conducted by the Beijing municipal institute of population research in 2006, 64.1 percent of the 248 young couples surveyed who would have been allowed a second child, as both the husband and the wife were an only child, expressed unwillingness to do so. One reason for young couples not wanting a second child or wanting to be DINKs – double income, no kids – is the skyrocketing cost of raising children. In addition, the intensified competition in China’s job market has already forced many young couples to put their careers first and postpone their plans to have their first child, let alone having a second one.

Worryingly, if this trend continues it may lead to a structural collapse of the population. According to the human resources white paper issued by the government in 2010, by 2035 China will face the situation where two taxpayers will be supporting one pensioner, while the number of taxpayers will be shrinking. Meanwhile, the decreasing supply of qualified labor will put a drag on the pace of economic development.

Since 2003, a growing labor shortage has spread from the southeast coastal areas across the country, suggesting the transfer of the rural labor force has passed the Lewis Turning Point and China has already lost its demographic dividend. The recent census indicates that the working-age population will begin to decrease between 2013 and 2015, and in the next 10 years the population aged between 20 and 40 may decrease by as much as 100 million. The slowing down of population growth and even a decrease in the population will cause domestic demand to atrophy and economic development will lose an important driving force. Even an immediate loosening of the family planning policy may not be that helpful in the short run, given the time it takes a new-born child to reach working age. READ MORE.

Rwanda: Time Is Now to Control Our Population Growth Rate

Editors

FROM ALLAFRICA.COM:

EDITORIAL

With each Rwandan woman producing an average of 4.6 children during her lifespan, our national fertility rates remain one of the highest in the world. At the same time, our population is growing at the rate of 2.8% every year with the use of any forms of birth control measure (contraceptive) at about 45%.

Even though the use of contraceptives has significantly increased from a mere 4% in 2005 to the current estimates of 45%, more than half of our women (55%) are not using modern birth control facilities. As a result, the country continues to experience rapid population growth that is putting enormous strain on the economy.

To be honest, Rwanda’s population growth is increasingly becoming unsustainable and the faster new rollback measures are put in place, the better for the country’s growth prospects.

First of all, the country is just emerging from the ruins of the past with hardly any resources to write home about. Secondly, Rwanda is a very small country with extremely limited land to sustain the rapid population growth in rural areas. Already with a population of 11 million, Rwanda stands out as one of the most densely populated countries in world when one considers the total land area of the country.

While some African leaders think that a big population means big markets for local goods and services, there are several dangers associated with unsustainable population growth. READ MORE.

Uganda: Population Growth Isn’t a Problem – Museveni

Editors

Note: Uganda’s total fertility rate, 5.9 children per woman, is one of the highest in the world, and is higher than the Sub-Saharan average of 4.8. The UN’s ‘medium variant’ estimate predicts that the population of Uganda will rise from 33 million in 2010 to 94 million by 2050 and 171 million by 2100.

ANNE MUGISA and CATHY MWESIGWA write in ALLAFRICA.COM:

President Yoweri Museveni has cautioned that the population issue in Africa should be put in its proper context and discussed without complacency, exaggeration or panic.

He observed that industrial societies do not have time to generate so many children and added that evidence shows that in Africa too, middle class women also do not have time to generate children endlessly.

Speaking at an international family planning summit in the UK Wednesday, Museveni said that population growth isn’t the problem but, according to him, underdevelopment and lack of social-economic transformation as well as child spacing which would ensure the health of babies and mothers.

Museveni was accompanied to the summit by his wife, First Lady and Minister for Karamoja, Janet Museveni.

He urged African governments and their development partners to sensitise the peasant women about child spacing to ensure spaced and planned child births. READ MORE.

China: How to Meet Population Challenges

Editors

ANDREW MASON, a professor of economics at the University of Hawaii, senior fellow at the East-West Center, and co-author of Population Aging and the Generational Economy, writes in CHINA DAILY:

China, perhaps more than any other country, faces many important and difficult population challenges: reproductive health and reproductive rights, rural-urban migration and reform of the hukou system, and imbalances in the sex ratio at birth. And two deeply connected population issues, the rapid aging of the population, on the one hand, and the low birth rate and the family planning policy on the other, are of great significance to China’s future development.

China’s population is aging as rapidly as anywhere in the world and its low birth rate means it faces a significant population decline in the not too distant future. In part, China’s population will age because people are living longer, an important dimension of China’s great progress. But the country’s low birth rate is the most important reason for population aging, leading to a very top-heavy age structure with many elderly, fewer workers, and even fewer children.

The low birth rate and population aging mean China faces two important economic challenges. The first is maintaining economic growth and poverty reduction, while the second is ensuring economic security for hundreds of millions of elderly.

Since the beginning of economic reform in 1978, changes in age structure have been very favorable in China. Because of the decline in the birth rate, only partly a consequence of the family planning policy, the number of children in China has decreased and the proportion of the population that is of working age increased. This led to a demographic dividend in China that provided an important boost to efforts to increase economic growth. Experts disagree about the size of the demographic dividend, but scholar Wang Feng and I believe that it added about 1.3 percentage points to economic growth between 1978 and 2000, smaller than some have argued, but still an enormous effect. READ MORE.

Nigeria Ranks High On Infant, Maternal Mortality Index

Editors

DAMILOLA OYEDELE writes in ALLAFRICA:

Abuja — Nigeria still ranks high the list of countries with high maternal and infant mortality rates with a ratio of 545 per 100,000 live births on the maternal mortality index and 75 per 1000 live births on the infant mortality index; these figures are from the UN World Population Prospects and the Institute for Health Metric Reports (2010).

Chairman of the National Population Commission (NPC), Chief Festus Odimegwu, who disclosed this while speaking at a press conference to commemorate this year’s World Population Day (WPD), added that the Federal Government had budgeted $3m annually to provide free family planning facilities for Nigerians.

Although some progress had been made since the release of the report, he said a lot more still needed to be done to prevent the avoidable deaths; stressing that only 58 per cent women had access to ante-natal care.

Odimegwu, who represented by the NPC Commissioner in the FCT, Mr. Sani Suleiman, outlined grim statistics of the health status of reproductive women aged between 15 and 49 in Nigeria. READ MORE.

July 11, UN World Population Day 2012: Universal Access to Reproductive Health Services

Editors

FROM THE UNITED NATIONS POPULATION FUND (UNFPA):

Reproductive health is at the very heart of development and crucial to delivering the UNFPA vision — a world where every pregnancy is wanted, every childbirth is safe, and every young person’s potential is fulfilled.

Universal access to reproductive health by 2015 is also one of the targets of the Millennium Development Goals. But we have a long way to go.

Reproductive health problems remain the leading cause of ill health and death for women of childbearing age worldwide. Some 222 million women who would like to avoid or delay pregnancy lack access to effective family planning. Nearly 800 women die every day in the process of giving life. About 1.8 billion young people are entering their reproductive years, often without the knowledge, skills and services they need to protect themselves.

On 11 July – World Population Day – many activities and campaigns will call attention to the essential part that reproductive health plays in creating a just and equitable world. Help us generate greater commitment to the idea that everyone has a right to reproductive health.  ACCESS THE UNFPA WEBSITE.