- FOREIGN AFFAIRS - Jack A. Goldstone and John F. May - MAY 18, 2023 -
In recent decades, the engine of the world economy has been the spectacular growth of China. From 1980 to 2020, fully one-quarter of the increase in global GDP was due to China’s growth, outstripping the contributions of the United States (22 percent), the European Union (12 percent), and Japan (4 percent). From 2010 to 2020, when the United States and Europe were still recovering from the Great Recession, the world was even more dependent on China; in that decade, China’s growth accounted for over 40 percent of the rise in global GDP.
As Others Slow, a Youthful Continent Can Drive Growth
China’s success story had much to do with the demographic profile of its enormous population. The country’s glut of young workers, eager to explore new opportunities in cities and special economic zones, powered the global economy. But that demographic advantage has now all but evaporated. China’s population is aging, and soon the country will see a shortfall in the workers it once had in abundance. As China wrestles with this challenge in the coming years, its economy is expected to slow down. The world will no longer be able to depend on China to power its growth.
What new engine of growth will fill the role that China has played in the last 40 years? India is often touted as the “next China,” but that remains an unlikely prospect because India will soon face many of the same demographic constraints now hobbling its fellow Asian giant. Instead, the world will have to look to the continent of Africa.
"O EIXO DO MAL LATINO AMERICANO E A NOVA ORDEM MUNDIAL"
The most recent UN estimates project that Africa’s population, driven by both falling mortality and high fertility, will grow from 1.4 billion today to 2.5 billion by 2050. With China, Japan, Korea, and European countries all likely to experience a sharp decline in young workers, the world economy is set to slow sharply unless it receives a productivity boost from the billion young people being added to Africa’s population in the next quarter century. The dynamism of Africa’s youth is central to the future of the global economy.
THE BABY BUST
In the next 30 years, China will have to deal with harsh demographic trends. Thanks to its one-child policy, which has driven down births since 1980, the Chinese prime-age workforce will fall by 40 percent from its 2010 peak by 2050, declining by 300 million workers. The existing workforce will grow older, and the population of seniors aged 65 and older will double. There is virtually nothing that China can do about this: even a sudden increase in births next year would do little to reshape the labor force for at least 15 to 20 years.
All eyes have, therefore, turned to India, whose population has just overtaken that of China. Yet this optimism is misplaced, as it overlooks the reasons for India’s continued population growth: not high fertility, but longer life expectancy. India has an extraordinary number of young workers, but its population, like that of China, is growing older. Just as in China, India’s birth rate has plummeted, with fertility falling from four children per woman in 1990 to just two today. In fact, India’s population of 15- to 24-year-olds—the more educated youth cohort that will drive rapid productivity growth—has already peaked in 2021 at 255 million and is projected to decline by 15 percent, or 40 million, by 2050.
The United Nations estimates that India’s population of 1.43 billion will increase to 1.61 billion by 2040, a gain of 180 million people. But prime-age workers between the ages of 15 and 49 will make up less than one-quarter of that increase, accounting for just 43 million people. Meanwhile, the number of Indians who are aged 60 or older will increase by over 100 million between today and 2040, more than twice the size of the prime-age workforce. That is hardly a recipe for rapid economic growth. After 2040, India’s prime-age workforce will start to decline, joining China in this downward trend.
Many other countries are grappling with this problem. Over the next 20 years, most of the world will face declining youth cohorts and shrinking labor forces, while having to care for an exploding number of seniors. With total fertility rates ranging from 0.8 to 1.3 in East Asia, from 1.5 to 1.7 in Europe and the United States, averaging 1.9 in Latin America, and now dropping to 2.0 in India, there is virtually no region of the world in which a rapidly aging population and a dwindling number of young people will not be dominant features of the next several decades.
THE OUTLIER
Except for Africa, that is. Fertility in Africa, at 4.3 children per woman, is roughly twice that of the rest of the world. That high fertility rate reflects, at least in part, a lack of access to education. Many demographers expect that if quality secondary education became universal for African women, fertility would dramatically decline. But at present, African countries have some of the lowest secondary school enrollment figures in the world, especially for women. According to the World Bank, only four in ten women of high school age in sub-Saharan Africa are enrolled in secondary education. In half of Africa’s 54 countries, including major states such as Angola, Ethiopia, and Uganda, less than one in five women have completed secondary education; in 11 states, including Ghana, Mozambique, and Niger, it is less than one in ten.