IN 1945, Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita launch their radio-repair shop, under the brand name Sony, in bombed-out Tokyo. In 2010, Greece faces a mounting debt crisis as its economy teeters on the brink of collapse. And starting in 2011, revolution grips the Arab world as the people of Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and elsewhere begin the long fight for democracy.
These events may seem unconnected. Each is undoubtedly the product of very different, complex circumstances. Yet some political scientists have begun to suggest that one common process was bubbling under all three, and many other political and economic shifts besides: a change in the age structure of a country’s population, known as the demographic transition.
A country goes through this transition as increasing numbers of infants reach adulthood and then move into middle and old age. It is generally accompanied by developments in infrastructure, urbanisation and education, and so it can sometimes be difficult to pick apart the relative contributions of the different forces shaping a country. Nevertheless, the claim now being made is that a country’s population dynamics can provide a crude indicator through which we can understand its history – and perhaps predict its future.
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At the root of the demographic transition are developments in medical care, which steadily sculpt a nation from the bottom up. In societies where child mortality is high, the population structure by age tends to take the shape of a pyramid, with a large proportion of newborns and progressively fewer people in each older age group (see chart). Better healthcare and more effective public health initiatives can protect young children from the diseases that once killed the majority of infants. For the first time in history, most kids get to grow up, so the population pyramid develops a thicker base. As the years roll on, adults respond by having fewer children, often helped by greater access to contraception. This adjustment takes time, though, so for a while there is a greater proportion of young adults – the so-called “youth bulge”.
This process happened first in Europe and North America, as the regions industrialised. Many countries in the developing world are now going through the early stages of this process – and the warning is that, if not handled properly, this could have great consequences for those countries’ internal stability. For example, if a government doesn’t meet the needs of the surge in young adults, the demographic transition may contribute to widespread discontent. There will be mass unemployment as all the young people compete for jobs – and alienated youth will be more likely to look for outlets for their frustration that involve violence. “A young, impoverished person may be considered both a potential low-cost recruit [for military groups] and an aggrieved individual motivated by economic and political exclusion,” wrote Henrik Urdal of the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Norway, in a . If it is indeed the overall proportion of young people, compared with the rest of the adults, that creates the tension, countries seeing a boom in the numbers of their youth may face these difficulties even if contraception hasn’t yet curbed birth rates to produce the characteristic bulge shape.
Fuelling conflict
In recent years, some political scientists have argued that , citing examples such as the French revolution and the rise of Hitler in the Germany of the 1920s and 1930s. Analysing internal conflicts in 175 nations during the second half of the 20th century, Urdal found that “with every percentage point increase in the youth population, relative to the [total] adult population, the risk of conflict increases by more than 4 per cent.” When young adults exceed , the risk is 150 per cent higher (International Studies Quarterly, vol 50, p 607). The relationship persists, he says, even when factors such as the state of national economic development, democracy and conflict history are filtered out. In a study for the non-governmental organisation Population Action International in 2003, , a researcher who currently advises the US government’s National Intelligence Council on demography, found that countries in which more than 40 per cent of the adult population is aged between 15 and 29 are .
Cincotta suggests that the youth bulge may even be fuelling the formation of paramilitary groups in some countries. Afghanistan, for example, is going through the early stages of the demographic transition, and young adults make up more than 50 per cent of the adult population, increasing the pool of potential recruits to an organisation such as the Taliban. That’s not to downplay the country’s religious and political history in pushing people down this particular path – the youth bulge simply adds to the complex circumstances that might drive people to choose more drastic options.
It’s not all doom and gloom. Provided young people are given opportunities to flourish, the youth bulge can be the making of a country. Urdal’s analysis, for instance, found that better provision of secondary education had “a clearly pacifying effect”, although he points out that this often goes hand in hand with development generally. In these circumstances, young people can fuel the future economy. After all, they tend to be high consumers and make a potent workforce. David Bloom of the Harvard School of Public Health has argued that this may have . In the past half-century, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and more recently Thailand and Vietnam, each developed better healthcare while cutting birth rates to below replacement levels, creating youth bulges in which the working-age population grew four times faster than the “dependent” population. More than two-thirds of their people were of working age. In each case, this coincided with fast economic growth.
Middle-age spread
The most dramatic beneficiary of this demographic dividend has been China, where extreme population policies produced the most pronounced youth bulge of all. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Mao Zedong encouraged a huge baby boom that saw the country’s population reach a billion by 1980. Then, his successors threw the gears into reverse, culminating in the one-child policy. By the turn of the century, the resulting bulge of people now of working age had turned China into the workshop of the world.
It remains to be seen if other countries will be able to cash in on their youth bulges. India, for one, may be facing a critical period. “The next 25 years offer India its chance,” says Wolfgang Lutz, director of the Vienna Institute of Demography in Austria. “Its proportion of children will fall by a third, while the proportion of elderly will stay small.” India’s government may believe that it can follow in China’s footsteps in exploiting this, but Lutz points out that almost half its population remains illiterate, whereas China began its rapid economic growth with three-quarters of its working age population benefiting from secondary education. Sub-Saharan Africa will face similar pressures. While it is still the continent with the youngest average age, a growing proportion of its population will be of working age by the 2030s.
Whether it proves a curse or a window of opportunity, the youth bulge is a temporary demographic phenomenon. As the boom generation ages, the population pyramid eventually turns to middle-age spread. What then? Urdal’s evidence suggests that ageing nations become less turbulent – perhaps because it is harder for military leaders to recruit supporters when there are fewer, impressionable youth. He points to the countries of western Europe and south-east Asia as regions that have experienced fewer conflicts as the youth bulge aged.
This may also be , according to some indicators. In a report for the Wilson Center, a US policy research organisation, Cincotta compared the median ages of countries with assessments of the people’s political rights, their freedom of expression, association and internet access, and other civil liberties, as rated by Freedom House, a Washington-based think tank. He found that most countries with a median age above 30 (suggesting an ageing youth bulge) qualified as liberal democracies, and three-quarters of those with a median age above 35 did so. It is a stark contrast to those at the other end of the spectrum: fewer than a tenth of the countries scoring well on democracy ratings have a median age of less than 20.
What’s behind the link? It’s possible that once a country has calmed down from the initial turbulence that comes with the youth bulge, the older population may have more invested in their country and greater political rights may seem like the way to achieve greater stability. Societies with a higher median age may also be more developed in terms of social infrastructure, urbanisation, and education, which might also make it easier for democracy to take hold.
The demographic transition does seem to provide a broad predictor of moves towards democracy. Cincotta in 2008, when he forecast that of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Algeria, at least one would be a stable democracy by 2020. Each had a median age of between 24 and 30. So far three – Tunisia, Egypt and Libya – have tried. The most successful has been Tunisia, the oldest, with a median age of 29. Egypt, with the youngest median age of 24.4, is engaged in a rancorous, sporadically violent transition whose outcome is still unclear.
Asia also offers some evidence that demography might give an idea of a country’s future. Thanks to fast-falling fertility, Burma’s median age has soared in recent years to 28. It also looks to be taking the first steps to some form of democracy. Indonesia, median age also 28, is similarly moving from autocracy to democracy.
Looking at the events in Syria, Cincotta suggests the country’s age structure may stack the odds against fully democratic reform, since its median age is just 22. Even if the rebels topple Bashar al-Assad’s regime, its population dynamics suggest another autocracy might follow. “Syria’s age structure is still youthful. And proportionally, few youthful states make it to democracy before crossing beyond a median age of 25 years.” If it matches the patterns of other countries, he predicts that Syria has “about a 50-per-cent probability of being a liberal democracy by 2023, which is quite a long way off.”
Even so, Cincotta warns against reading too much into the demography of individual states to make short-term predictions – the concept really only applies to broad trends over the course of decades, and his research highlights some notable exceptions. Many of the former Soviet states, along with China and Cuba, fail the Freedom House tests for democracy, and all have a relatively high median age of above 35. One possibility is that older populations are more conservative: if a country has passed a critical demographic point without a change in its governance, its people may be more ready to stick with the status quo. But this is just a hypothesis and many other factors must play a role.
Beyond middle age lies old age. In most industrialised nations, a “senile bulge” looms, especially where fertility rates have fallen to well below replacement levels. By 2025, Germany (current median age 43) expects to have twice as many citizens in their 60s as children under 10. In the years immediately following the second world war, which saw the founding of Sony and many other industrial giants, Japan was the original youthful tiger economy. But it now has the oldest population on the planet – a median age of 45, with 30 per cent of its population over 60 – and Japanese demographers believe it is no coincidence that the country, with a straggling workforce, is now in its third decade of economic torpor.
“Japan was the original youthful tiger economy, but it now has the oldest population on the planet”
Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the European economies with the biggest problems today are often the oldest. They include Greece (median age 43) and Italy (median age 44), which, until a recent rise in its retirement age, had just 1.3 taxpaying workers per pensioner. Infused by migrants and with higher birth rates, the UK and US are relatively sprightly, with median ages of 40 and 37 years respectively.
Meanwhile, China’s youth bulge is ageing fast. Its median age of 35 is almost double what it was when the one-child policy started. On present trends, by 2050 it will have 400 million people over 60. Demography suggests that the Chinese economic boom will soon turn to bust.
As the demographic transition plays out in the coming decades, the global population stabilises and national youth bulges grow old, we can perhaps look forward to a world that is less economically dynamic, but also more peaceable and democratic. We still have choices. Successful nations will need to see older people – like the restless young adults before them – as a valuable resource, not a burden. Demography may not determine our destiny, but it certainly shapes it.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Youthquake”
