Some news links: Montréal & Calcutta migration, Chinese languages, former Soviet Union, borders

• La Presse notes that suburbanization proceeds in Montréal, as migration from the island of Montréal to off-island suburbs grows. This is of perhaps particular note in a Québec where demographics, particularly related to language dynamics, have long been a preoccupation, the island of Montréal being more multilingual than its suburbs.
• The blog Far Outliers has been posting excerpts from The Epic City: The World on the Streets of Calcutta, a 2018 book by Kushanava Choudhury. One brief excerpt touches upon the diversity of Calcutta's migrant population.
• The South China Morning Post has posted some interesting articles about language dynamics. In one, the SCMP suggests that the Cantonese language is falling out of use among young people in Guangzhou, largest Cantonese-speaking city by population. Does this hint at decline in other Chinese languages? Another, noting how Muslim Huiare being pressured to shut down Arabic-medium schools, is more foreboding.
• Ukrainian demographics blogger pollotenchegg is back with a new map of Soviet census data from 1990, one that shows the very different population dynamics of some parts of the Soviet Union. The contrast between provincial European Russia and southern Central Asia is outstanding.
• In the area of the former Soviet Union, scholar Otto Pohl has recently examined how people from the different German communities of southeast Europe were, at the end of the Second World War, taken to the Soviet Union as forced labourers. The blog Window on Eurasia, meanwhile, has noted that the number of immigrants to Russia are falling, with Ukrainians diminishing particularly in number while Central Asian numbers remain more resistant to the trend.
• Finally, JSTOR Daily has observed the extent to which border walls represent, ultimately, a failure of politics.

Some links from the blogosphere

As a prelude to more substantial posting, I thought I would share with readers some demographics-related links from my readings in the blogosphere.

• The blog Far Outliers, concentrating on the author's readings, has been looking at China in recent weeks. Migrations have featured prominently, whether in exploring the history of Russian migration to the Chinese northeast, looking at the Korean enclave of Yanbian that is now a source and destination for migrants, and looking at how Tai-speakers in Yunnan maintain links with Southeast Asia through religion. The history of Chinese migration within China also needs to be understood.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money was quite right to argue that much of the responsibility for Central Americans' migration to the United States has to be laid at the foot of an American foreign policy that has caused great harm to Central America. Aaron Bastani at the London Review of Books' Blog makes similar arguments regarding emigration from Iran under sanctions.
• Marginal Revolution has touched on demographics, looking at the possibility for further fertility decline in the United States and noting how the very variable definitions of urbanization in different states of India as well as nationally can understate urbanization badly.

On how the relative youth of India will not ensure future prosperity

When I saw the title of Sandrine Rastello's Bloomberg article "India to Emerge As Winner from Asia’s Shrinking Labor Force", I initially expected some naive demographic boosterism, some argument to the effect that India's young population will ensure it of future economic triumphs. Happily, this article was one where the title does not match the subject.

By 2050, the Asia Pacific region will have nearly 50 percent of the world’s total work force, down from 62 percent today, according to Bloomberg analysis of United Nations data.

The shifting patterns will see India account for 18.8 percent of the global work force compared with 17.8 percent today, toppling China from the top spot. China will account for 13 percent, down from 20.9 percent now.

[. . .]

India's super sized labor force is often referred to as its demographic dividend, a key asset on its way to achieving economic superpower status. But there's a lot of catching up to do: its per person income is just a fifth of China's.

One obvious problem for India will be finding jobs for such a large populace. Employment data in Asia's third-largest economy is sketchy but the little we have suggests the labor market is far from vibrant.

A survey of selected companies including those in the leather, car and transportation sectors show employment growth fell to 64,000 new jobs in the first three months of the year from 117,000 in the previous quarter, and 158,000 before that. Not exactly what you would expect for an economy growing at 7 percent.

India also suffers from a skills shortage. About 5 percent of workers have formal skills training, compared with 96 percent in South Korea. Central bank Governor Raghuram Rajan called India's human capital his main medium-term concern.

This is something I've noted here before: In August 2012 I noted this in relation to the United States that might not capitalize on its demographic advantages over other high-income countries, in passing in a January 2013 comparison of high-fertility France with low-fertility Germany, and in January of this year when I compared China with Southeast Asia. Crude demographics is but a single starting point. They are not at all by themselves able to determine everything about the future. In the case of France and Germany, for instance, despite dire demographics Germany has moved notably ahead of France in the past decade. Why might China, even if it has an aging population, manage the same trick versus at least some of its potential rivals?

Some assorted blog links

While I'm assembling some original material, I thought I'd point readers to some population-related blog links that appeared on my RSS feed in the past month or so.

• Considering the Mediterranean migration crisis, Crooked Timber featured one essay arguing that European restrictionism is culpable for deaths, while the New APPS Blog praised the bravery of migrants.
• The Dragon's Tales noted that immigration from China and India to the United States has surpassed that from Mexico.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog considered, in the wake of the Nepali earthquake, the ill-regulated international market in birth surrogacy.
• Kieran Healy noted how popular estimates of the composition of the American population are frequently quite wrong, going back to the errors of popular wisdom.
• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer noted that rates of childlessness among American women with post-graduate educations has plummeted. More discussion at the blog.
• The Russian Demographics Blog had a whole slew of interesting posts, including looks at the changing composition of migrants from Russia and changing destinations and volumes of flows to and from the country, along with examinations of problematic data on HIV/AIDS in Russia and an old forecast of the epidemic.
• Window on Eurasia reported on how one Muslim commentator in Russia thinks Russian Muslims should respond to the prospects of a Muslim majority in Russia. (I find it unlikely, and of note mainly as a case study of crude demographic boosterism.).

If you've suggestions as to new blogs I should follow, please, submit them--and any especially interesting posts--in the comments.

On how China and Asia show how demographics alone is not destiny

Back on the night of the 4th of October, I joined thousands of Torontonians in wandering the streets late at night, looking at some of the works of art put out for public display in the all-night art festival of Nuit Blanche. One of the works I found most evocative was an installation mounted by Montréal-based artist Maria Ezcurra, draped on an alleyway on Spadina Alley in Toronto's oldest oldest Chinatown. The installation's title? Made in China.

The installation is composed of clothes labeled “Made in China,” donated by the community and set in a Chinatown alleyway. This collaborative piece functions as a façade filling an empty space between two buildings, creating in this way both a physical and a symbolic connection among cultures.

The work is about connections between Eastern and Western societies, between old customs and current trends, between globalization and tradition. It is about how we see and understand ourselves from other views, and vice versa. But mostly, it is about trying to build a bridge in which we are all represented, as a society as much as individuals.

Made in China is an anthropology of our shared present. Clothing in this project is perceived as an effective artistic medium for knowing and learning in new ways about ourselves in relation to others, thus symbolically connecting individual knowledge with culturally produced ideas.

Two months later the news came out that once again, China now had the world's largest economy, at least measured by purchasing power power and in aggregate. China, as Joseph Stiglitz noted in Vanity Fair, is sufficiently large and sufficiently rich to be #1 again, and a major force in the world.

China is also facing the prspect of rapid population aging. Feng Wang 2012 analysis for the China Economic Quarterly, "Racing Towards the Precipice". Between a shift to low levels of fertility and rapid increases in life expectancy, China's working-age population can be expected to start contracting just as its population of potential retirees is growing. Multiple sources predict the working-age population will peak in just a couple of years. This sort of rapid aging could impose very serious costs on China. Ultimately, it could lead to China not completing its economic convergence towards the high-income societies of the world.

Will this necessarily mean that societies with more advantageous age structured, especially neighbouring ones, will profit? That potential certainly does exist, for instance in Southeast Asia. This International Business Times article sets the tone of that argument.

Home to 600 million people and located next to the growth engines of China and India, countries comprising the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) economies face the challenge of creating enough jobs to absorb their domestic growing labor forces and building infrastructure to boost productivity, according to an HSBC economist.

“We believe the future, at least from a demographic and natural resource perspective, belongs to ASEAN,” HSBC economist Trinh Nguyen said in a research note. “But whether this will be realized will be dependent on the will of the countries’ leaders.”

Although seen as the new frontier for growth, these Southeast Asian countries still performed below their potential, averaging just 5 percent growth in the past decade. The region attracted $111.4 billion in foreign investment last year -- almost equal to China’s $121.1 billion. But Nguyen thinks ASEAN countries can and should do better.

In the coming decades, ASEAN nations will have more prime-age adults (age 25-54) than ever before, and their dependency ratio (the proportion of the young and aged to working age adults) will drop significantly, freeing up resources for other investment opportunities, according to HSBC. Economic behavior varies at different stages of life -- while the young require investment in education and health, and the aged require health care and pensions, prime-age working adults supply labor and savings.

Emphasis should be placed on "potential." William Pesek's Bloomberg View commentary from last month, "When Even $7 Trillion Isn't Enough", notes that despite generally more advantageous age structured Southeast Asian countries aren't necessarily in the position to benefit.

For all the handwringing over rising labor costs on the mainland, China's annual output per manufacturing worker remains a staggering 15 times greater than Vietnam's ($57,100 versus $3,800), four times Indonesia's and more than three times that of Filipinos. Bottom line: Higher wages may not drive as many foreign manufacturers out of China and into Southeast Asia as some have predicted. Why relocate southward only to get less for your money?

Given all the hype about regional integration next year, those numbers should be sobering. On Jan. 1, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations will take its most dramatic step yet toward creating a Europe-like common market for 600 million people. McKinsey reckons that a better-integrated Asean could generate as much as $615 billion in fresh economic value annually by 2030. But it will take many years and considerable political will to unify 10 disparate economies that often compete more than they cooperate, and the progress won't necessarily be linear.

Infrastructure is, of course, vitally important to making Southeast Asia more efficient. As Tonby points out, Asean would be well served by "overcoming some of the fragmentation that has prevented companies, technologies, and services from achieving scale in the past."

But human development -- including aggressive investment in education, training and healthcare -- could be even more critical. Take Indonesia. Southeast Asia's biggest economy often touts its demographic dividend -- 26 percent of its 250 million people are under 15 -- but that's a strength only if Jakarta gives them the tools to compete. "We often brag about how much cheaper we are in terms of labor vis-a-vis that of China and vis-a-vis other parts of the world, but we tend to overlook the fact that we're not as marginally productive as China," says Gita Wirjawan, Indonesia's former trade minister. "We've got to do something about building the soft infrastructure for the purpose of creating a much more marginally productive society."

The same is true in Thailand -- where an inefficient and underfunded education system continues to hold down productivity -- as well as Myanmar, Vietnam, the Philippines and elsewhere. Even as they map out new highways and railroad tracks, Asean governments need to increase investment in education exponentially. As of 2012, for example, Indonesia was spending 3.6 percent of gross domestic product on education, while Malaysia spends 5.9 percent and Thailand 7.6 percent. Those ratios need to be closer to 20 percent in the years ahead.

Going something further afield, Dhiraj Nayyar's "Making 'Make in India' Work", also for Bloomberg View, makes the argument that things are even worse in China's trans-Himalayan neighbour.

Consider land. A new land-acquisition law, passed in the dying months of the previous government in 2013, makes buying farmland on which to build factories tremendously complicated and expensive; by law, companies have to pay four times the market price in rural areas. There's simply no free market for land in India.

On labor, India should have a cost advantage over China, whose labor-intensive goods now flood the Indian market. Chinese wages have risen rapidly over three decades of double-digit growth. India’s haven’t, and almost half the population is still engaged in unproductive agriculture. Yet tough labor laws mean that the opportunity costs of hiring workers remain cripplingly high. While the government has started a debate on reforming those laws, few changes are evident yet.

Unreliable and expensive power supplies hamper all of India's businesses. Indian governments have long subsidized agriculture and regular consumers by charging higher rates to industry. China and other emerging nations have followed the opposite strategy. India need not reverse course completely, but it needs at least to even out prices for everyone while boosting overall supply.

The issue of expensive capital is one that should particularly exercise Rajan. He knows that India’s closed financial system artificially raises the cost of capital. He's stuck with a tight monetary policy for the moment because of high inflation. But compared to the rest of the world, Indian interest rates tend to be too high even when monetary policy is more accommodative. There's also plenty more room for India to open up its financial system, even if it remains wary of the kind of cowboy capitalism that led to the 2008 crash.

As numerous sources note--for instance, the OECD report "Economic Outlook for Southeast Asia, China and India 2014: Beyond the Middle-Income Trap" (PDF format)--moving beyond the middle-income stage countries need to innovate to move ahead. Simply having large numbers of workers will not guarantee economic growth if other elements of economic policy aren't sufficiently adept. China, notwithstanding its documented problems and likely prospects, has so far been making a better job of its particular age structure than its neighbours have. Will they catch up? (Will China slow down even further?) All that remains to be seen.

This sort of thing shouldn't need to be emphasized. Look, for instance, at central Europe, where despite advantageous geography and high levels of human development bad policy kept central Europe from catching up with northwestern Europe in the fashion of southern Europe, and where now population aging may mean central Europe might never completely catch up. Demographics, alone, is not destiny. There are things that can be done to make the most of it; there are things that can be done to do otherwise. Simple statistics, by themselves and without interpretation, do not necessarily mean that much.

A few population-related news links

This evening, I thought I'd share a few interesting population-related news links I've collected in the past couple of weeks.

* The Discover Magazine blog 80 Beats summarized a recent study of young game-playing children in Beijing suggesting that these children are less trusting and more risk-averse than one might expect.

* On a perhaps-related note, an article in the latest issue of The National Interest by John Lee examines at length the consequences of China's rapid aging on its economic model, among other things.

* An article in The Guardian contrasting a relatively prosperous Chinese northeast with a stagnant Russian Far East makes the point that Russia need not fear millions of Chinese crossing their country's northern frontier. What incentives would there be for them to leave?

* The Taipei Times covered a recent statement by the head of the South Korean central bank calling for more immigration to ameliorate the effects of population aging.

* An Inter Press Service article notes that rising life expectancy for Japanese women is, unfortunately, being accompanied by falling incomes.

* The Population Reference Bureau's Behind the Numbers blog notes that birth rates have continued to decline throughout India.

* In Canada, a recent article in The Globe and Mail notes that there's an east-to-west income gradient for immigrants in Canada, immigrants in Québec enjoying substantially lower wages than their counterparts in Ontario who in turn earn less than their counterparts in western Canada.

* In the Atlantic Canadian province of Nova Scotia, meanwhile, the provincial government is trying to boost its attractiveness to immigrants in the face of declining immigrant numbers and a local population tending to decrease.

* In Europe, the Portuguese-American Journal notes that statistics indicate that more than one million Portuguese have left the country in the past fourteen years. This sort of emigration, which if anything seems to be accelerating, has obvious consequences.

* In the nearby Spanish region of Galicia, the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation's Swissinfo takes a look, in the article "From Galicia to the Jura", at one community in Galicia that has been marked by emigration to Switzerland as a natural life stage for a half-century. (Likewise, emigration isn't slowing down.)

* A New York Times article profiles the Chinese of Barcelona, who have apparently so far resisted the effects of the Eurozone recession well.

Some more population-related links

The immigration of white South African farmers to Georgia, according to Eastern approaches, is actually occurring.

In August 2010, showing commendable imagination from a 5,000-mile distance, the authorities in Tbilisi invited South African farmers wanting a change of scene to consider an alternative: farming in Georgia. The country has an exuberantly pro-business government, low crime rates, and soil that positively squelches with underexploited potential. Once an agricultural power-house, Georgia now farms less than half of its arable land. It has less than half the number of cows and one-third of the pigs that it had in 1990. Agriculture employs over half the population, yet contributes less than a tenth of GDP. Ridiculously, this fertile country now imports 70 percent of its food. As a result, many of Georgia’s poorest people live in the countryside. Agriculture contributed over 16% of GDP in 2005, but only 8% in 2010.

[. . .]

Many local farmers are still suspicious. Most of them are subsistence-level producers; nation-wide, the average farm is less than one hectare. Seeing a government that has long paid them little attention suddenly court South Africans has produced mixed feelings. Last year, local farmers demonstrated in the village of Zeghduleti, near Gori, after common pasture that they had long used for grazing was cleared for sale to a foreign investor. After a number of arrests, the farmers were eventually advised to slaughter their cattle or graze them further afield. Georgia’s impatient government has a taste for dramatic change and short-term results. But as farmers know better than most, patience can be a virtue too.

Marginal Revolution observes that the incumbent Haitian president might be expelled from office if it turns out that he has been hiding a foreign citizenship, dual citizenship being unpopular in Haiti as a general rule and potentially even cause for banishment if a dual citizen involves himself in politics.

Marginal Revolution wonders why more Americans aren't moving to booming western Canada. The general consensus in the comments seems to be that Americans find it more difficult to move to Canada that you'd expect, for legal and cultural reasons as much as anything else.

The Population Reference Bureau's blog notes that improvements in sex ratios at birth in Indian states have stagnated for the time being.

The northwestern states of Punjab and Haryana have been the worst offenders. Haryana, formerly part of Punjab, was created in 1966 and borders Delhi to the north, west, and south. In 1999-2001, these states had very low SRBs of just 775 and 803, respectively. While they have since risen to 836 and 849, the last three SRS reports show a worrying tendency for the SRB rise to have leveled off. A low birth rate is often considered motivation for sex-selective abortion as male children could be more valued when couples have few children but that pattern is definitely not uniform across India. In Punjab, the total fertility rate (TFR — the average number of children a woman would bear in her lifetime in the birth rate of a particular year were to remain unchanged) was 1.9 in 2008 and 2.5 in Haryana. But it was also low in Karnataka (2.0) and Kerala (1.7), states with SRBs in the normal range. And, the two states with the highest TFRs, Bihar (3.9) and Uttar Pradesh (3.8), have low SRBs. Together, those latter two states hold 300 million population, one-fourth of India’s total.

Anatoly Karlin's brief post at Sublime Oblivion makes a convincing case that Russian demographics are no longer uniquely dre, with rising fertility, falling mortality, and net migration.

Some demography links

This afternoon--this afternoon in Toronto, at least--I thought I'd share with you five interesting demographics-related blog posts.

At Behind the Numbers, Mark Mather reports on the news that men in the United States are catching up to women in terms of life expectancy.

Dealing with my earlier post about biased sex ratios in the South Caucasus, fellow Livejournaler demographer has written--translated post here, original post here--on the subject, suggesting that the apparent deficit is a consequence of the underregistration of female births.

Geocurrents' Martin Lewis writes about the barrier along the Pakistani border built by the Iranians, dividing the historical region of Baluchistan. While built in an effort to control insurgents, the wall has a secondary use of limiting Pakistani migration into Iran.

The Global Sociology Blog links to an extended BBC series describing the effects of the male-biased sex ratio in India, describing things as varied as the grief of women forced to abort their daughters, the migration of women from more sex-balanced areas in southern India to the male-biased north, the shocking deterioration in the sex ratio in Kashmir, and Indian government efforts to encourage the birth of female children.

At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen summarizes a new book by Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd and the subtitle is A Convergence of Civilizations: The Transformation of Muslim Societies Around the World. This book makes the point, made here several times, that Muslim societies around the world are also going through the demographic transition, albeit each in their own distinctive ways.

"Ripples from Bengal"

As an addendum to my previous post, I thought I'd share with our readers an essay from Himal South Asian, the December 2010 essay by Afsan Choudhary "Ripples from Bengal". Drawing from the history of his family, descended from mid-19th century migrants from what's now Bangladesh to what's now West Bengal, Choudary provides a potted history of migration in Bengal--at first within, then from--from the 19th century on. Migration patterns are intimately tied to the patterns set by colonialism.

Migration – be it within national borders or beyond, voluntary or forced – has long been part of Bengali life. Anil Seal, in his seminal book India and the Emergence of Indian Nationalism talks of how the British in Bengal created the new clerical ‘babu’ class to serve their own needs, which coincided with the aspirations of the emerging Bengali middle class. Schools and colleges sprang up in response to the demand for education, but soon there were more graduates than jobs. This is what set off the internal migration from Bengal to other parts of India, particularly modern-day Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, where there was demand for an educated class. The Ganguly family of the well-known Indian film stars Kishore and Ashok Kumar was part of this Bengali migrant population.

While Bengali migrants to North India (and Burma) belonged largely to the middle classes, the journeys of the poorer migrants usually took them to the Indian Northeast. When Syed Ahmed Khan and the Nawab of Rampur (in present-day Uttar Pradesh), the former a Muslim and the latter a Hindu, came together to fight the immigrant Bengalis, they were responding to classic anti-immigrant sentiment. Their organisation, a splendid sign of interfaith political cooperation, was dedicated to fighting these new arrivals. Syed Ahmed’s virulent anti-Bengali feelings are rooted in the appearance of Bengali graduates taking jobs that locals thought were rightfully theirs. When many people in India today rail against Bangladeshi/Muslim ‘outsiders’, there are clear echoes of the rage at the arrival of Bengali Hindu migrants into the colonial United Provinces.

Migration, which is today seen as a security issue between New Delhi and Dhaka, began with little protest from local indigenous people when it came to the Northeast. There were no national borders to be crossed at that time – it was all British India, and the locals were not asked their opinion because they were poor and with little political organisation. It really did not matter whether anyone was going there, went the thinking, because no one else wanted to do so.

Between 1947 and 1971, large-scale migration was non-existent in East Pakistan save for the border areas, where national boundaries existed in the eyes of the states but not the border people. My grandfather travelled back and forth between Shillong, where he ran a restaurant, and Dhaka, where his family had moved after 1947, thus existing as a stranger in both lands. In 1965, while he was visiting Dhaka, war broke out between India and Pakistan. He was declared an enemy, his restaurant was seized by his business partner and he was rendered a pauper overnight. Till his death in the mid-1970s, Grandfather gradually retreated into his own mind, continuing to live in his Shillong home inside his head. He had experienced what many Hindus did in East Pakistan: living in two lands and then paying a price for doing so, despite the fact that the two lands look and feel – and are – so similar. Likewise, for my ‘refugee’ uncles, life in East Pakistan was brutal, as they had no networks and never managed to build or find any. They were lost in the labyrinths of failure into which most forced migrants disappear, marginalised and part of neither land, immigrants to nowhere.

[. . .]

Internal migration rem.ains a largely invisible phenomenon. Within Bangladesh, people move to harvesting work every season, creating a relatively unknown migrant culture with its alternative survival strategies and values. And as the landless population increases, so too does internal migration. Some move from the rural areas to Dhaka, choking an already dysfunctional city even as the new extreme poor populate the city in a desperate attempt to survive. Sometimes internal migration produces deadly results, as in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. From the mid-1970s, the Hill Tracts saw militant insurgency by the indigenous Chakma population and a brutal pacification attempt by the Bangladesh Army. One containment strategy was to bring in landless people from the tidal flats of the Bay of Bengal to the hills, and give them free land for cultivation. The clear idea was to create a pro-state local population to marginalise the highlanders and reduce them to a minority. The new migrants, already brutalised by poverty and natural disasters in their erstwhile homes, became vicious in protecting the land given to them. In this way, then, internal migration was successfully used as a military tool, while the indigenous highlanders lived in refugee camps in India. When they returned following an agreement in the mid-1990, few got their land back.

While emigration and migration to most areas require certain qualifications, connections and money, none of this is required when one moves to India. Duly, millions have gone across the border over the last century. This process, which was an ‘internal migration’ till 1947, thereafter became an illegal international border crossing, increasingly attached to security implications. In the Indian Northeast, clashes between migrants and local indigenous populations have resulted in regional instability, while elsewhere in India the Bengali of Bangladesh is often accused of being linked to ‘terrorist’ activities. Many of these migrants are reduced to mere shadows, living lives of wretched poverty and fear. Another destination for the very poor is Pakistan, where many work as domestic servants and in the fisheries sector, so badly off that they spark pity even among Pakistanis. Their lives as migrants are as poverty-stricken as the ones they left behind at home.

We now see three distinct trends in Bangladeshi migration: emigration for settlement to Europe, Australasia and North America; contract labour migration to the Gulf and a few Southeast Asian countries; and of course the movement of people across the border areas, mainly to India. Migration to West Asia has drawn attention due to its enormous impact on the home economy. Remittances have emerged as a key driver of economic growth and poverty reduction in Bangladesh, increasing at an average annual rate of 19 percent over the last three decades. The World Bank reports that remittances – the bulk of which come from West Asia – now exceed all other types of foreign-exchange inflow. The Bangladeshi migrants in West Asia do not constitute a monolithic block, of course. Professionals are comfortable, while labourers lead miserable lives. But when the latter return to Bangladesh, they constitute a newly rich group in impoverished rural areas, a new local elite impacting on power relations – and keeping the economy from collapsing.

Bangladesh entering the 2010s

The Economist's Asia blog Banyan has a post up exploring the mechanics of Bangladesh's upcoming census. The quality of information available to date, the reader learns, is poor and quite debatable.

According to the adjusted 2001 census figures, Bangladesh’s population stood at 129.3m (an initial count put it at 124.4m; an adjustment for the standard rate of undercounting then boosted the figure). Those familiar with the census mechanics tell of a muddle, marked by “multiple technical problems” starting with some official’s decision to procure inferior paper, which fouled up the optical-scanning process…which in turn undermined the quality of the data set. This time, donors are handling the pens and paper—the EU is chipping in over €10m ($14m), or more than a third of the total cost of the census.

The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics’ population clock claims that, at midnight today, that number had risen to 150,220,172. But many think the clock is running too slow. Bangladesh’s statisticians have almost certainly underestimated the natural population growth since the last census, according to the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research. Researchers at the Dhaka-based international research institution—it has been monitoring the country’s population for 40 years and has the longest-running and most comprehensive demographic data in the developing world—put Bangladesh’s current population at 162m.

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) agrees, almost to the letter: it put the population at 164.4m in 2010. It is the UN body’s estimate that has enraged Bangladesh’s politicians, some of whom care about these things. A.M.A. Muhith, the finance minister, has called the UN estimate—which suggests that the government may have 14m citizens it would appear to prefer not to have—“condemnable” and “unauthorised meddling”.

The difference reflects UNFPA’s pessimistic assumptions about the speed of fertility decline. Helped along by one of the world’s most expensive fertility-reduction programmes, Bangladesh has seen a dramatic fall in its total fertility rate. In the late 1970s, women had seven children on average; by the early 1990s just over three. The fertility decline settled at a plateau in 1993-2002, but has resumed sliding since. It has not, however, made up for that lost time. In 2010, the year Bangladesh’ s National Population Policy aimed to achieve the replacement level fertility of 2.2, it still hovered at 2.5.

[. . .]

Arithmetically speaking, it is a battle over the size of a denominator—many indicators of economic development are expressed as a proportion of the total population. Politically, a small population is a nice thing to have. This is because the smaller it is, the more impressive Bangladesh’s progress on the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will look (and the warm feeling would be mutual). This refers to progress made towards the goal of halving the proportions of poor and hungry people. So the size of the population matters, either directly or indirectly, for it serves as a denominator in the vast majority of indicators by which progress on the goals in the MDG framework are measured.

A good place to start an overview of the Bangladeshi population might be to compare it with the Pakistani population. Until 1971, after all, Bangladesh was known as "East Pakistan", the eastern wing of the state that was supposed to include the Muslim-majority territories of the former Raj. The underrepresentation of East Pakistan in the country's affairs led to a regionalist movement that became a separatist movement that led to a Bangladeshi declaration of independence and eventually liberation by India. Of the two wings, East Pakistan was the most populous; estimates gave East Pakistan had 70 million versus 60 million in West Pakistan. In the early 1970s, after the half-million killed in the 1970 Dhola cyclone and the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of civilians killed by Pakistani soldiers in the 1971 war, Bangladesh was seen as having far worse development prospects than rump Pakistan, called a "basket case" by Henry Kissinger, the sort of "hopeless" land that Paul Ehrlich would have callously abandoned to famine and mass death.

Instead, things have reversed. Even the highest estimates for Bangladesh's population place it behind the population of Pakistan, and the difference will continue to grow as Bangladeshi fertility rates remain below the comparable Pakistani figures. Bangladesh is catching up on the Human Development Index, too; indeed, Bangladesh has seen some of the highest rates of HDI growth in the world. While still lagging behind Pakistan on metrics like literacy and life expectancy, Bangladesh is catching up quickly. The Bangladeshi economy, too, has done reasonably well since the 1990s, driven by a successful garment industry and famously the home country of microcredit institutions. Tahmina Anam is right to conclude that more things are going right in Bangladesh than wrong.

Regarding Bangladeshi demographics, Mohammad Shahidul Islam at Roubini.com suggests that Bangladesh is set to enjoy the economic dividends of its advanced demographic transition.

Based on the stylized facts of the demographic transition model, one can see the dynamics of Bangladesh’s population transition. According to the United Nation’s Population Prospects 2008 database, total fertility rates (TFR) in Bangladesh have declined, from 6.85 children per woman in 1971-75 to 2.36 in 2005-2010. The TFR is projected to approach a replacement level (2.1) in the period 2015-2020. The population growth rate declined from 2.67 per cent in 1970-75 to 1.42 per cent in 2005-2010. The crude birth rate and the crude death rates in the country are now 21.6 and 6.3 (per 1000 population) respectively.

Based on these statistics, Bangladesh is now at the beginning of Stage III of population transition. In other words, it has entered the stabilization era of population transition. Bangladesh’s population transition has been following nearly the same pattern that Europe and East Asia experienced.

[. . .]

Bangladesh’s dependency ratio has declined, from 92 in 1975 to 53 in 2010. A nation’s demographic window generally opens when the dependency ratio (non-working to working age population) goes below 50. In South Asia, Bangladesh and India are projected to enjoy a large demographic window (2015-2050) thanks to a sharp decline in their dependency ratios.

[. . .]

Until the 1980s, Bangladesh’s per capita income growth was very low owing to a high dependency ratio. With a high birth rate, low death rate and subsistence economy the country’s economic development till the 1980s resulted in poor per capita income growth. However, the scenario has changed since the late 1980s and early 1990s when Bangladesh witnessed a sharp decline in population growth and a steady increase in GDP growth with low volatility.

Of special note, Bangladeshi sex ratios are better than elsewhere in the region.

Moreover, Bangladesh has done much better than many of its neighbours, including India, in terms of gender-related demographic statistics. This development will provide additional impetus to Bangladesh’s demography. With an improved sex ratio, the females’ share is approaching half of the total working age population in Bangladesh. Studies show that the actual growth rates of South Asia and other lagging regions were at least one percentage point lower than their potential growth due to gender imbalances.

I've come across anecdotal press reports of Bangladeshi women being valued as potential marriage partners in Indian states like Punjab lacking in marriageable women. Interesting possibilities lie here.

This connects to the phenomenon of Bangladeshi emigration. It is large, in absolute numbers and relative to receiving areas, as Banyan notes. There is an overseas Bangladeshi diaspora numbering somewhere in the area of four million people, mostly concentrated in Middle Eastern migrant-receiving countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as well as to Malaysia, but including large communities in the United Kingdom and the United States, even the nucleus of a Bangladeshi-Canadian community here in Canadian Toronto. Much larger in absolute size is the scale of Bangladeshi immigration into India, most controversially into the northeastern state of Assam where the presence of Bangladeshis--Bengalis, generally--has become a political issue frequently erupting into violence, but also into culturally kin West Bengal and elsewhere in India.

This emigration, frankly, is inevitable. Before Bangladesh was East Pakistan it was East Bengal, a region with a Muslim majority separated from the region and British imperial province of Bengal certainly not because it was a self-contained unit with economically viable frontiers (as noted by Nafis Ahmad in a 1950 paper for Economic Geography) but because it had a Muslim majority population. Under British rule, East Pakistan was a producer of commodities, raw materials to be transferred to the Bengali industrial centre and port in Calcutta. The inter-state frontier led to East Pakistan being cut off from its natural hub, now in the Indian state of West Bengal. While Bangladesh has since developed its capital Dhaka as a new industrial centre and port in Chittagong, it still lags behind West Bengal economically. Critically, despite the state frontiers separating Bangladesh from neighbouring Indian states Bengal remains a functional human region in a way that--say--the Punjab divided between India and Pakistan does not, with a shared language and culture and a famously porous border and communal relations generally less fraught. In Partition, for instance, Bengal lacked the same scale of communal violence as in Punjab, while the dwindling of the Hindu proportion of the Bangladeshi population from 40% a century ago to a bit more than 9% now has as much to do with lower Bangladeshi Hindu birth rates as it does with the forced migration and/or massacre of Hindus. (A highly disproportionate share of the murdered and displaced civilians in 1971 were Hindus, targeted by Pakistanis--not their fellow Bengalis--for persecution by virtue of their religion.)

All things considered, it would be more surprising if Bangladeshis didn't Emigrate, to India and elsewhere. Whatever notable degree of economic development Bangladesh has achieved, it is ultimately still dependent on the wider world for its future, and Bangladeshi migrants are a critically important resource for their homeland, the mostly unskilled and semi-skilled labourers sending back huge volumes of remittances to their homeland despite their vulnerability--as now in Libya--to events in their adopted homelands.

On the Pew Forum's disproof of Eurabia

My latest post at my other group blog, History and Futility, was entitled "Why Eurabia?" Why, in the face of the abundant evidence that the prospect of a Muslim majority in any European country--indeed, of particularly large Muslim minorities anywhere--do large numbers of people (like Glenn Beck) predict an imminent caliphate in Europe?



Eurabia's fundamentally an ideology of revenge ("Ha, ha, you didn't support us, now you're going to get raped by Muslims!") as well as an ideology of envy. Muslims, imagined by Eurabianists as beings somehow completely resistant to the influences of modernization and post-modernization etc., are imagined as perfect conservatives, retaining the superfecundity of old and maintaining the traditional family. Why them? some ask. Why not us?

Eurabia's all the more ironic since many sources–the Economist, Douglas Todd’s blog The Search, the Globe and Mail, the New York Times–have reported on a recent report by the Pew Research Group observing that Muslim population growth is slowing, and certainly Muslims won’t become majority populations in any European country.

At the heart of its analysis is the ongoing effect of a “youth bulge” which peaked in 2000. In 1990 Islam’s share of the world’s youth was 20%; in 2010, 26%. In 2030 it will be 29% (of 15-to-29-year-olds). But the Muslim world is slowly heading towards paunchiness: the median age in Muslim-majority countries was 19 in 1990. It is 24 now, and will be 30 by 2030. (For French, Germans and Japanese the figure is 40 or over.) This suggests Muslim numbers will ultimately stop climbing, but later than the rest of the world population.

The authors call their calculations demographic, not political. Drawing on earlier Pew research, they say conversion is not a big factor in the global contest between Islam, Christianity and other faiths; the converts balance out. Nor do they assess piety; via the imperfect data of the United Nations, the European Union and national statistics, they aim simply to measure how many people call themselves Muslim, at least culturally, if asked.

New numbers, they say, will change the world map. As Indonesia prospers, its birth rate is falling; South Asia’s remains very high. By 2030, 80m extra mouths in Pakistan will boost its Muslim numbers to 256m, ousting Indonesia (with 239m) as the most populous Islamic land. India’s Muslim minority will be nearly as large at 236m—though growth is slowing there too. And in 2030 India’s Muslims will still constitute only a modest 15.9% of that country’s swelling total, against 14.6% now.

The report asserts no causal link between Islamic teaching and high fertility rates, although it notes that poverty and poor education are a problem in many Muslim lands. In Muslim countries such as Bangladesh and Turkey, it observes, the lay and religious authorities encourage birth control. Better medical care and lower mortality boost poor-country population numbers too.

[. . .]

The total Muslim share of Europe’s population is predicted to grow from 6% now to 8% in 2030: hardly the stuff of nightmares. But amid that are some sharp rises. The report assumes Britain has 2.9m Muslims now (far higher than the usual estimates, which suggest 2.4m at most), rising to 5.6m by 2030. As poor migrants start families in Spain and Italy, numbers there will rocket; in France and Germany, where some Muslims are middle-class, rises will be more modest—though from a higher base. Russia’s Muslims will increase to 14.4% or 18.6m, up from 11.7% now (partly because non-Muslims are declining). The report takes a cautious baseline of 2.6m American Muslims in 2010, but predicts the number will surge by 2030 to 6.2m, or 1.7% of the population—about the same size as Jews or Episcopalians. In Canada the Muslim share will surge from 2.8% to 6.6%.

The report in question--"The Future of the Global Muslim Population: Projections for 2010-2030"--makes for very interesting reading. Suffice it to say that although Muslim populations are growing more quickly, it is a consequence of relatively higher fertility--declining notably, however, for the same reasons as in Iran or Turkey or Tunisia or any other country where urbanization, the liberation of women, and economic pressures has pushed fertility down--and a relatively large proportion of young people of childbearing age. In the case of Europe, the projections suggest that a tenth of the populations of France, Belgium, and Sweden will be Muslim by 2030, that the proportion in western Europe as a whole will rise from 4.5% now to 7.1%, noting additionally that right now Muslim fertility is below replacement levels in Germany, Italy, and Spain, the gaps between Muslim and non-Muslim populations continuing to close. Russia, notably, is and will be home to one-third of Europe's Muslims, but even there proportions won't change overmuch (~11% to ~15%). And in case you're worried about India, the projections suggest a rise in the Muslim proportion of the Indian population from 14.6% to 15.9%.

The study's methodology looks fine to me: conservative, well-grounded in facts, not making the sorts of sweeping predictions of radical transformation that always merit the most stringent skepticism. Notably, projections are made only two decades into the future, roughly one generation, beyond which point much happens. Are radical changes possible? Sure. Are they likely? No. One may as well predict a huge surge in non-Muslim fertility as not, or mass Christian immigration into Muslim lands. (The latter is possible, by the way; the huge disparities in income between North Africa and the Middle East to the north, and sub-Saharan Africa to the south, could drive interesting population movements.)

Alas, this fine report won't be considered by the prophets of Eurabia. Eurabia is a fantasy, product of an ideology that imagines the punishment of errant nations by a terrifyingly perfect, inhuman conservatism. Envy and revenge fantasies can't be defeated so easily as all that. Pity, not least since these fantasies can lead to any number of horrifying outcomes.

On the migration-as-invasion motif

Back in August, a friend of mine, Andrew Barton wrote about the minor fictional sub-genre of invasion literature, which developed in Britain in the late 19th century in response to fears that the country was vulnerable to any number of military threats (first France, then Germany). It spread around the world, adopted in countries which feared their neighbours, adopted and maintained even to this day if less ardently.

The world has changed in the last hundred years; there's no longer a massive groundswell of anxiety in mainstream society about whether the Stars and Stripes or the Union Jack or whatever flag you choose to fly is about to be lowered for the last time. This may be less true in Australia: yesterday I saw a trailer for the upcoming movie Tomorrow When the War Began, which appears to be nothing if not Red Dawn down under, and Red Dawn itself is being remade with the Chinese, not the Russians, as the invaders of America.

Migration is frequently seen as a form of invasion, as an intrusion by one alien population into the domain of another, ostensibly for practical purposes (work, say, or school) but actually hoping to destroy this nation and replace it with their own. Recently, the motif has made it into young adult literature, in Australian writer John Marsden's Tomorrow series, which features an invasion and occupation by a Southeast Asian power that might well be Indonesia, this Indonesia interested in colonizing that island continent.

If invasion literature does come back in a big way, though, it won't be the same as the original nineteenth-century wave; it'll be informed by the fears of the present. What I wouldn't be surprised to see is a new wave of invasion literature based around the idea of the developing world invading the developed.

It was the story of MV Sun Sea, a vessel loaded with hundreds of Tamil refugees that made landfall on Vancouver Island last week, that got me thinking along these lines. Refugees are always a hot-button issue, and there will always be people who agitate for them to just be sent back where they came from - the fear of strange Others coming to your land unbidden from over the sea is, like Michael Valpy wrote in the Globe and Mail, a kind of primal xenophobia. It's also something we're going to have to learn how to deal with, because unless all our projections are off, the incipient climate and food and water crises of the next fifty years are going to generate a massive tide of people desperate to escape the privations of the developing world.

I can easily see a new wave of invasion literature tapping into the undercurrent of xenophobia that this would generate: stories about how these other, impoverished countries are trying to "steal" the developed world's wealth, and probably also their women - because, honestly, invasion literature would probably be a man's genre. Hell, I can even see the possibility of "liberal" invasion literature, tapping into the developed world's culpability in keeping the developing world depressed and vulnerable to climate shocks.

The prototypical migration invasion novel is Jean Raspail's 1973 :Le Camp des Saints/The Camp of the Saints, where weak-willed and excessively humanitarian Westerners do nothing as waves of immigrants from the Third World both domestic and foreign come and take over (Indians in Europe, Chinese in Siberia, African-Americans in the United States).

It goes without saying that migration-themed invasion literature contributes nothing at all good to discussions on migration and population. The simple fact is that migrants are normal people (gasp!), experiencing conditions at home which make them try to take advantage of a better environment elsewhere, whether in another region or another country. Perhaps most of the time migration is intended as a temporary phenomenon, as a way to earn economic or social capital that could be used at home, wether to sustain a community of origin or to make investments. When migrants stay, dDiaspora cultures do endure, but they haven't conquered and do eventually assimilate; even in the course of the great Germanic migrations into the Western Roman Empire, where Germanic-speaking Arian Christians ruled over Romance-speaking Roman Catholics, in the end the ruling elite assimilated to the majority population. Identifying waves of migration that aren't military invasions as attempts to destroy the receiving country is ridiculous, with militarized borders ironically discouraging migrants from leaving, on account of the costs and risks of going to and from the country where they make their living.

All I can say is that the language, the rhetoric used by people matters. Especially in a time when literally unbelievable irredentisms--Greater Mexico, Eurabia, Indian and Russian caliphates, Greater China--are discussed much more by fearful people than by the irredentists' nominal audience, and are acted upon as actually existing threats, honesty counts.

On climate change and migration

The American law blog The Volokh Conspiracy is an unusual place to find guest blogs about migration driven by environmental change, but Matthew Kahn, author of the book Climatopolis does have a guest post there. He argues--as he does here, for instance--that migrations triggered by climate change need not be catastrophic, and in fact can be quite manageable or even net economic pluses. A central point of his analysis is that all cities will not be effected equally.

Not all cities will suffer equally from climate change. There are over 300 major cities to choose from in the United States. A city such as Seattle may suffer much less. An implicit assumption throughout Climatopolis is that there will always be some safe area where our cities can thrive and we can migrate to. If the entire 7 billion people on the planet lived at Hong Kong’s density then we would need 1.1 million square kilometers of habitable land. This represents just .7% of the world’s land mass.

Suppose that California’s coastal cities suffer greatly from climate change due to the combined punch of sea level rise, hotter summers, drought and rising electricity prices. Self interested households will see that California cities are no longer great places to live and they will “vote with their feet” and migrate to other cities that have suffered less from climate change or perhaps even gained due to warmer winter temperatures.

[. . .]

Our ability to migrate means that urban places can suffer while urban people continue to prosper. Within the New York City metropolitan area, New Jersey employment centers may gain if Southern Manhattan and Wall Street are under siege from sea level rise. Land owners in Southern Manhattan will suffer but workers at downtown Goldman Sachs would not.

Kahn even suggests that these migrations, from areas heavily impacted by climate change to areas not-so-heavily impacted, could through the reallocation of labour into more vibrant and/or rejuvenated environs. If the proper human connections exist, of course.

Growth economists have long argued that human capital (attracting and retaining the footloose, skilled) is the key for a nation or a city to enjoy sustainable growth. If a city such as Los Angeles loses its quality of life edge, then the skilled will move elsewhere and firms will be less likely to move to Los Angeles. Similar to a neighborhood with high crime or bad schools, local real estate prices will fall. The owners of such assets will bear the incidence of this “new news”. While real estate values would decline in cities deemed to be increasingly at risk, there are other cities that could actually experience a windfall. Today, you can trade one home near UCLA for 100 Detroit homes. In 2070, will this exchange rate still hold or will there be parity?

[. . .]

Does this same optimism hold in the developing world? In the United States, there are a large number of cities scattered across various geographical regions. In other nations such as Bangladesh, there is unlikely to be the same menu to choose from. As “environmental refugees” seek out safer havens they may cross political boundaries into nations where they are not welcome. Developed countries could ease adaptation in the developing world if they loosen immigration restrictions. Migration also represents an upfront investment that requires resources. The poorest of the poor may be unable to move and not to have the information or social networks concerning potential beneficial destinations.

I agree with Kahn to a certain extent. Back in June 2009 I blogged about climate change-driven migration in West Africa, noting how there were already well-established traditions of migration to and from the Sahel to the West African coast, and these these migrations played a significant role in economic growth in littoral states like Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. Could a substantial migration of skilled Californians rejuvenate a Detroit notable for a decent locatino and very low real estate prices? I don't doubt it. If climate change-driven migration isn't a sudden process, but rather takes place on time scales on the order of decades, it needn't be unmanageable.

But. Kahn's analysis assumes that there is little possibility catastrophic runaway change with effects as outlined by Sublime Oblivion's Anatoly Karlin at the link previous, or that if it does happen the consequences will be manageable. This strikes me as optimistic. Le monde diplomatique observed that in 1998 the expected influx of very large numbers of Kosovar refugees into Albania threatened to destabilize an already shaky economy, while in 1999 the consequences of the Kosovo catastrophe weighed heavily on the entire western Balkans region. If, say, the Netherlands is significantly flooded, what would happen? Where would the Dutch go? What would happen to the Eurozone economy? If California enters a long period of economic decline precipitated by a worsening climate, what will happen to the American economy? If Shanghai floods, or has to protect itself, what will happen to the Chinese? Et cetera. The loss in infrastructure investments alone, never mind symbolism/morale, would be serious indeed.

The political and social consequences of migration of this scale also need to be considered. In Côte d'Ivoire, the migrations from the Sahel were eventually used for political and economic reasons to trigger xenophobia among the Ivoiriens de souche, leading to more than a decade of civil war and division. The decades of net migration from the Sahel did benefit Côte d'Ivoire, but the country experienced a meltdown nonetheless. The factor of xenophobia is less of an issue in some countries and regions than in others--the American population may be mobile enough to cope--but it still has to be considered. In the example of Bangladesh, source of perhaps tens of millions of migrants in India who often act as cheap labour, fears of Bangladeshi immigrants' links to terrorism and flee Assam won't help things in the case of future mass migrations.

And then, there is the question of what people who need to migrate but don't have the connections necessary to successfully migrate--or even migrate at all--will do. What will be done?

A brief note on demographics and sex and fear and envy

I'd like to thank Conrad from Facebook for pointing me to this Asia Times article, " India lost in 'love jihad'". The Indian state of Kerala, with its population both multiconfessional and well advanced in its demographic transition, is seeing some unusual tensions.

As part of an organized campaign, young Muslim men are deliberately luring women from different faiths into marriage so they will convert to Islam, say radical Indian Hindu and Christian groups in south India.

The alleged plot has been dubbed "love jihad". It first surfaced in September, when two Muslim men from Pathanamthitta town in the southwestern state of Kerala reportedly enticed two women - a Hindu and a Christian - into marriage and forced them to convert to Islam.

The women first claimed to have became Muslims voluntarily, but after being allowed back to their parents' houses said they had been abducted and coerced to convert. The men were reportedly members of Campus Front, a student wing of radical Muslim group the Popular Front of India (PFI).

The Pathanamthitta incident was followed by an avalanche of media reports on "love jihad". Some described it as a movement, others claimed that forced conversions through marriage were actually being run by an organization called Love Jihad, or Romeo Jihad.

Hindu and Christian groups have weighed in with their own "facts" on the "love jihad".

The Sri Ram Sene, a fundamentalist Hindu group, now claims thousands of girls were forcibly converted to Islam in the past few years after marrying Muslim men. It says that after conversion the women were "trained in anti-national activities". India's main opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, has said "love jihadis" have receiving foreign aid - from the Middle East - for the campaign.

Senior Christian leaders are now campaigning against the alleged threat.

"Around 4,000 girls have been subjected to religious conversion since 2005 after they fell in love," Father Johny Kochuparambil, secretary of Kerala Catholic Bishops Council's Commission for Social Harmony and Vigilance, wrote in an article in the church council's newsletter.

One thing that has constantly popped up in scare talk about population trends, not only in the discourses surrounding Eurabia (tackled here and here) and an Islamized India (here) but in relation to other disliked population groups, is the way that the superfecundity and ultratraditional family orientation of these other groups is made an object of fear and envy. The fear comes from a supposed recognition that these outsiders possess a population dynamic that is unstoppable, rooted in an unyielding tradition that is set on the destruction of our culture. The envy, well, it comes from a desire on the part of these terrified commentators to have the old-time family values reinstalled at home, traditional gender relations and economic structures and all. Take the Archbishop of Guam, who recently dispatched a letter praising Islamic fundamentalists, with their fervent belief and attachment to values of family and self-sacrifice, as an example of this sort of phenomenon.

Never mind if the reality fits, of course (people have been known to convert for love, and there are 30 million people in Kerala; methinks a Family Values Panic is ongoing); the threat is at least as effective a way to mobilize followers. Here, claiming that your group's young women are being enticed or worse abducted into the enemy's camp is as good a way of achieving this mobilization as any.

"Murderous identities and population paranoia"

Over at Himal South Asian, Mohan Rao's article "Murderous identities and population paranoia" explores the uses and misuses of popular demography in the wider world and particularly in India, host to a very large and diverse population. Indian Muslims, a population marked by period fertility rates higher than the average for Hindus and consequently a higher rate of population growth--over the 1991-2001 period, the Muslim population grew by 30% while the Hindu population grew by 20%--are the subject opf theories not wildly different from Eurabia claiming that Muslims will outreproduce Hindus and take over the country.

Although the population argument is seen to lend itself to a variety of prejudiced political projects across the world, the 20th century has also witnessed ‘communalisation of demography’ in the Subcontinent. In India, this has helped propel the discursive power of the communal myths (and outright lies) that surround the population question – or what some have termed ‘saffron demography’, an idea that carried particular weight in the election in Gujarat soon after the 2002 anti-Muslim carnage. Ethnic nationalism, combined with various fundamentalisms, gives saffron demography a particularly vicious punch. Of course, the communalisation of the population question is not unique to India. Present within Southasia (and many parts of the rest of the world), it seeks to legitimise offensive policies against minorities in order to build political consensus across newly created political majorities, fixed around ascribed identities that are all too often manufactured. Such a proposition is useful not just in manufacturing these majorities, but also in instilling fear, which is seen to bear political dividends.

There is an offensive slogan currently in use in North India, which is a play on a popular population control slogan of yesteryear – Hum do hamare do; woh paanch, unke pachees, which crudely translates as ‘We [Hindus] are two and have two children; they [Muslims] are five and have 25 children’. The suggestion is simple and beguilingly appealing, but also deeply flawed. The reference is, of course, to the fact that Hindus are not allowed by civil law to have more than one wife, while Muslims in India can have four. What this does not reveal is that data clearly shows that unlawful bigamous or polygamous marriages are more prevalent among Hindus than among Muslims. For example, as per the available data, the percentage incidence of what are called polygynous marriages (in which a man has more than one wife) is 5.8 among Hindus, while it is 5.73 among Muslims. What this also overlooks is that, assuming a situation of relatively equal males and females, a Muslim man with four wives would actually contribute less to population growth than if each of the wives were to be married to different men. Another oversight is that Muslims, like Hindus, are not a monolithic, homogenous community. Muslims in Kerala or Tamil Nadu, indeed in South India in general, typically have smaller families than Hindus in states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in North India. Clearly, then, religion is not the main issue at play.

In response to a recent series of articles in the Indian press attempting to debunk myths about high Muslim population growth rates, this writer received a barrage of vehemently critical letters. Some suggested a change of name and conversion to Islam; others argued that he was an enemy both of Hindus and of India in general, and that he should go to Pakistan. Some others offered some bizarre facts to ‘refute’ what was being said. There was a long letter, enclosing two papers presented at international conferences for non-resident Indians, arguing that Muslims seek, through population growth, to overrun Europe. The correspondent was a retired inspector-general of police, a member of what seems to be a front organisation of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) named the Patriotic Front. What is remarkable among these people is that facts are relatively unimportant; they are useful only if they further prejudice.

Although I'd quibble with some of his arguments on the role on demographics in determining wider political and cultural trends, the article's quite worth reading.

Demographics and an Overheated India?

Note: Parts of this post are re-produced from my own post on this subject over at Alpha.Sources.

There has certainly been much debate and discussion lately about what has been known as India's sizzling growth rates whether this rampant pace of the Indian economy is sustainable or whether in fact the economy was on its way to overheat and perhaps even collaps. More interestingly, this discussion has pitted our very Edward and his Indian colleagues over at the Indian Economy Blog against no other than the hegemoneous English magazine the Economist. As such, if you have been following the readings in the Economist as of late the journal has on several occasions pointed to the worrying signs of India's economic growth. A week ago the Economics Focus column featured two studies which compared economic growth in India and China; both of them by Barry Bosworth and Susan M. Collins from the Brookings Institution; 1) Accounting for Growth: Comparing India and China and 2) Sources of Growth in the Indian Economy. And the conclusion as quoted from the Economist Economics Focus column.

INDIA has been swept by optimism that its economy can do as well as China's. A recent article in the Economic Times claimed that the growth in India's total factor productivity (TFP), the efficiency with which inputs of both labour and capital are used, had accelerated, whereas China's had slowed owing to wasteful investment. As a result, the article boasted, rising productivity—the main driver of long-run economic growth—is now running neck and neck in the two economies. Close inspection of the numbers, however, reveals that China remains well ahead.

And now, in this weeks edition of the Economist the magazine punches through as the same story has found its way to the cover of the magazine in form of a leader and a special report. I won't go much into the refutation of the Economist's articles as such. To that end Nanubhai over at IEB already has an excellent critique up. However, the Economist also specifically notes the concept of the demographic dividend and more specifically how attributing importance to the role of demographics constitutes a mechanic view on economic growth. The two key quotes are pasted below:

From the leader ...

India's demographic structure is indeed starting to look more like that in East Asia when its growth took off. But this mechanistic view of growth assumes that demography is destiny and that economic policies do not matter. In fact, open markets, education and investment, especially in infrastructure, were the three chief ingredients of East Asia's success. Population growth by itself does not add to prosperity, unless young people are educated and new jobs are created. India needs to reform its absurdly restrictive labour laws which hold back the expansion of manufacturing particularly.

and from the special report ...

The growth optimists point to India's favourable demography. The population of working age will continue to rise for several decades, whereas in China it is expected to fall. This, it is argued, will boost India's workforce and both saving and investment. Furthermore, 60% of India's labour force is engaged in low productivity farming. As workers shift from agriculture to more productive jobs in industry and services, this will automatically boost GDP growth. Yet this assumes the newcomers will all find jobs. If those jobs do not appear, the so-called demographic dividend will more likely turn into a demographic disaster. Some 60% of the demographic bulge will come in five poor and badly governed states.

This is just one example of how economic commentators tend to confuse India's long-term potential (what is feasible provided the best policies are put in place) with its current potential (ie, non inflationary) growth rate. That India has huge long-term potential is undeniable, but without reforms the country cannot fully exploit it.

I clearly disagree with the Economist here and mostly this is because I feel like the magazine is picking on a strawman of our arguments at this site. So have we who believe in the importance of demographics misunderstood the situation here? The first important point I think is that the Economist indeed is right to point to the necessity for the right policies and political development to unlock India's long term potential. In fact, this is perhaps the most important point here and as such favorable demographics need to go hand in hand with sound policies especially in India where the risk of mounting regional inequality poses hazards for political stability and thus economic development. I don't think any of us has ever argued otherwise. However, now that we are talking about long term potential as oppose to trend growth it should be clear that these two cannot be totally detached and the reason is exactly the point The Economist itself implicitly refers to, namely the path dependancy of how demographics affect the long term growth potential. This is also why it is important to realize that demographics' effect on economic growth far from constitutes a mechanic view on economic growth. However, it is important I believe to the stress that the real source of India's long term potential first and foremost lies in the fact that the country now is passing through its DD and as such now has the potential to set in place policies which can ensure the apt exploitation of the economy's long term growth potential. Policies or perhaps more preciesly I think institutions do indeed matter for long term economic growth. The important point is though to realize that the population structure changes and as such the DD becomes a window of opportunity to lock in the highest possible sustainable growth trajectory for India going forward. So in the end, I have one main point here.

I do not agree with the Economist that attributing a weight to demographics in long term growth comprises a mechanic view of economic growth. Far from it and in fact the neo-classical steady state assumption which is essentially neutral to the structural economic changes which occur as a result of demographics is much more mechanic in my view since this theory clearly is out of tune in terms of how demographics affect economics. However, I am not accusing the Economist for naive steady statism here and as such the view on economic growth fielded in the Economist relates much closer to the idea of endogenous growth which contrary to neo-classical (exogenous growth) emphasizes the endogenous nature of economic growth as a function of the importance of policies for long term growth. However, where does this leave demographics then? Surely, the original neo-classical assumption of a fixed rate of population increase as a positive contribution to the slope of the steady state curve clearly, I believe, misses the big picture in terms of how economic growth is affected as a country passes through the demographic transition which (and please pay attention here) does not end with fertility rates stabilizing at replacement levels and thus a natural increase in the population. As such the crucial process of ageing which is occuring with different pace all over the world cannot be fed into the traditional long term growth model. But what about endogenous growth then? How should this view on growth tackle demographics? Surely demographics still constitute an exogenous shock to the economy? Well, this is exactly the point, does it really? I won't go into detail with my views here since I fear it would be too long and twisty but just to say that this issue is in part what we are discussing in terms of India. In fact, the transmission mechanism and indeed feedback loop between enacted policies and how demographics positively or negatively impact the economy in the long run constitute some of the most important areas of economic research focus in these years since ageing is well upon us and ultimately since I sincerely believe that we need to understand this much better in order to be able to connect the dots and thus make the right decision.

Demographics are not destiny but damn important and reducing the view that demographics actually matter for economic growth to a mechanic view on the topic is a critical blow which misses the importants points I think.