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.

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.

More on Iran's continuing demographic transition

Over at the Population Reference Bureau's Behind the Numbers blog, Farzaneh Roudi writes about the latest population-related news in Iran. trying to reverse the ongoing demographic transiton in Iran that I wrote about last July, Ahmedinejad wants to create a sort of baby bonus for prospective Iranian parents. This bonus, Roudi notes, won't go nearly far enough to overcome the real economic costs of parenthood.

Under this new plan each child born in the current Iranian year, which began March 21, will receive a $950 deposit in a government bank account. They will then continue to receive $95 every year until they reach 18. Parents will also be expected to pay matching funds into the accounts. Then, children can withdraw the money at the age of 20 and use it for education, marriage, health and housing. But Iranian parents, with their daily economic struggle to make the ends meet, know that this amount is not going to go far. This reminds me of when I was in Iran about 10 years ago, a few months after Dr. Marandi, former Iranian minister of health, received UNFPA’s annual award for his contribution to improving maternal and child health in Iran. When I told relatives and friends about Dr. Marandi’s award and the drop in fertility, they all had a similar reaction. They would laughingly say, “Why did HE receive the award? You only need to go to a grocery store and check prices and you can see for yourself why families don’t want to have more children.” And today, prices are even higher than 10 years ago.

This crude approach also underestimates the extent and depth of the changes in Iranian culture. Traditional gender norms, no matter how strictly the Iranian government might try to enforce them, are going.

Iranian women live a modern lifestyle that is often not seen in Western media that show women covered head to toe in black, as if they belong to centuries ago. Elementary school enrollment is universal; the gender gap in secondary school enrollment is almost closed; and more girls are enrolled in universities than boys. And more important, the educational system is modern and only a very small percentage of students attend religious schools—contrary to what is happening in some neighboring countries. In short, Ahmadinejad’s argument—rejecting family planning as a Western and secular plot – is not going to be bought by Iranians. Despite continued international economic sanctions and political isolations, secular ideas are pouring into the country through satellite TVs and the Internet. Iranians have the second-highest rate of Internet use in the Middle East and North Africa region, after the United Arab Emirates.

While I don’t see much reason for Ahmadinejd’s new policy to influence country’s overall fertility, the crude birth rate in Iran is going to increase for a decade or so, as the baby boomers go through their childbearing years. So one should not rush to judgment and attribute future increases in the number of births to the success of Ahmadinejad’s policy. Today, a significant portion of Iran’s population are in their 20s and early 30s (prime ages to marry and have children), born during the high-fertility era around the 1979 Islamic revolution and 1980s.

If anything, I'd suggest that Iran's government trying to force traditional gender roles on economically autonomous women could lead to women postponing or opting out of parenthood altogether, pushing Iran towards the lowest-low fertility trap that dominates southern Europe within a generation. That wouldn't do anything for Iran's economic prospects.

A brief look at Iranian demographics

Iran's demographic structure is characterized by the huge baby boom of the 1970s and 1980s. The Iranian population more than doubled in recent years, rising from 33 million in 1976 to some 70 million in 2006, with a very high proportion of young people produced by the baby boom of the early to mid-1980s that saw TFRs in some regions approach 10 (!). The story, of how, despite restrictions placed on women, heavy investment in infrastructure, education, and health care--along with the sanctioning of contraceptive use--precipitated a rapid demographic transition, while a difficult economic situation and the bloody 1980-1988 war with Iraq cause women to delay their first births, space their second births, and to limit the growth of their families, moving towards a two-child norm, is well-known. Mohammad-Jabal Abbasi-Shavasi's paper "Recent Changes and the Future of Fertility in Iran" (PDF format) outlines the historical background for Iran's rapid fertility decline, noting how access to family planning, improved access to education for girls, a greatly improved public health infrastructure, considerably improved transportation and economic pressures to produce a transition in the space of two decades to replacement-level fertility. Abbasi-Shavasi further predicts that as Iran becomes still more urban, producing a more educated and more woman-friendly society, national fertility rates will continue to fall to sub-replacement levels. An abstract of a recent paper ( Mehyarh and Agraganian, "Below Replacement Fertility in Iran: A District Level Analysis of the 2006 Census") reveals further startling data about the extent of the decline.

A large-scale DHS-type survey conducted in October-November 2000 indicated that total fertility rates of Iranian couples had dropped to 2.0 (1.7 in urban areas vs. 2.4 in rural areas). TFR figures for the total population of provinces derived from this survey ranged from 1.4 to 4.1, being below replacement level (2.1) in 14 of the 28 provinces. Total fertility rates of urban couples ranged from 1.3 to 3.5 but rose above 2.0 in urban areas of nine of the 28 provinces only, being above 2.4 in only one province (Qom, 2.7) and above 3.0 in another one (Sistan-Baluchestan, 3.5). In rural areas, too, provincial TFRs varied between 1.5 and 4.7. They were below 2.1 in ten of the 28 provinces and rose above 3 in only three provinces (Khuzestan, 3.2; Hormozgan, 3.3 and Sistan-Baluchestan, 4.7).

[. . .]

Thus, according to the 2006 census, over 80% of the population of Iran belong to provinces with clearly below replacement fertility rates. Among these, there are 10 provinces with very low TFR values (ranging from 1.15 to 1.45). They contain over 52% of total, 57% of urban and 41.4% of the rural population of Iran. Of the urban population, 66% live in 16 provinces with very low TFRs (1.15-1.5). In rural areas too, only 41.2% of the population live in provinces with TFRs ranging from 2 to 3.7, while over one-third belong to provinces where the TFR of rural population is less than 1.7. Considering district level variations, it is found that only one of the 336 districts has a crude birth rate exceeding 30 (Saravan District in the south eastern Province of Sistan-Baluchestan with a CBR of 31.6, implying a TFR of 4.3). In 54 districts CBR values vary between 20-30 (indicating TFRs vaying between 2.5 and 4.0). In another 96 districts CBR values are found to range between 17-19.9 (TFR equivalents being 2.1 to 2.5). Thus in 155 districts (or 45% of districts) total fertility rate of Iranian couples would seem to be above replacement level. The population of these 155 districts is however only 37% of the total population of Iran.

As noted here, Ahmadinejad's simultaneous calls for a near-doubling of the Iranian population to 120 million and a denunciation of the demographic transition are quite likely futile, and would besides detract from a demographic structure relatively favourable compared to those of its neighbouring countries.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent remarks, appealing to Iranian legislators to take steps to boost the country’s population from 70 to 120 million and condemning the country’s recent attainment of the two-child family, raise questions about the Islamic republic’s demographic future. Because Iranian women’s average fertility is near (and perhaps below) the replacement level,1 demographers project the country’s youthful population (15-to-29 year olds comprise about one-half of all adults) is on track to develop, within a decade, into an older, more manageable age structure resembling those of East Asia’s industrializing economies in the 1990s. Should it remain on this path, Iran’s population will evolve away from the politically volatile age structures plaguing neighboring Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia to the west and south, and Afghanistan and Pakistan to its north and east.

Demanding that women have more children is famously futile; even baby bonuses might not work. The demographic transition is well-implanted in Iran.

The authors go on to observe that Iran's demographic transition is most advanced in the most developed northwestern provinces, while the south and east of the country lags behind the national average. This RAND paper suggests that, to varying degrees, there are medical and educational inequities between provinces inhabited by ethnic Persians and provinces inhabited by non-ethnic Persians--Azeris, Kurds, Baluchis, and others--but these may reflect levels of development and don't seem to detract from a unified Iranian national identity.

It has been observed elsewhere that the Middle East and North Africa has the potential to benefit from a favourable demographic structure, with relatively large cohorts of young adults and relatively few elderly providing a high worker-to-population ratio. Certainly there will be an abundance of workers since there are huge pressures on Iranian labour markets: "By 2006, sixteen million Iranians in the 15-24 age group with be joining the working-age population. They will be replacing four million older Iranians who will presumably exit the potential labor force between 1996 and 2006 at the age of sixty."

Babak Pirouz' 2005 article in Business Week, "Iran: Perfect demography, lousy economy" makes the point that Iran's demographic structure, with a large number of working-age adults but relatively few dependents, could give Iran a huge economic advantage if adequately exploited. If.

Because of those years of pro-family social policy, however, Iran has a demographic profile that some development experts regard as a dream. The high birth rate of the 1980s created an enormous pool of young adults beginning to pour into the labor force. Meanwhile, those starting families have fewer children to support, because of the resurgence of birth control. That means new parents can spend more on personal consumption and their children's education. What's more, a big government investment in university training means many new workers are highly skilled. This looks like the smart, pro-growth policy that helped East Asia achieve dramatic growth from the 1970s through the '90s.

But Iran is no Taiwan or Singapore. The Shia Muslim nation's economy is so strangled by government control and regulation that it produces too few jobs to absorb all those college grads. In the past, experts say, most graduates got jobs with the government. But government agencies are saturated, and there aren't enough private jobs to employ all the would-be engineers and computer programmers pouring out of the schools. Indeed, most private enterprises in Iran are small businesses that employ 10 or less. The surfeit of educated young people represents "an immense opportunity for the country," says Hassan Taee, a professor of economics at Allameh Tabatabie University in Tehran and the ex-deputy head of Parliament's research center. But the economy isn't structured to take advantage of it.

This Population Reference Bureau blog entry makes the point that Iran's young adults, often discontented with the Islamic Republic's cultural norms and frequently economically and educationally deprived, subject to efforts by the clerical establishment to try restrict and regulate youth culture with the aim of socializing them in the Republic's norms, are unhappy and responding by emigration.

Whether Iran will manage to reap the benefits of its demographic dividend (having a large working-age population relative to the younger and older population groups who depend on the working-age population) all depends on how well its economy is equipped to create jobs for its rapidly expanding and mostly educated labor force. The youth unemployment rate (15 to 24 years old) stands at 23 percent, twice that of the total labor force. Finding a job is even more challenging for young women. One in three young Iranian women in the labor force (defined as either working or looking for a job) are unemployed. Young Iranians have been leaving the country in large numbers to find jobs in faraway places as Canada and Australia. The cost to the country for losing its human capital is estimated to be $40 billion a year.

And, one might add, by looking to street politics. The Islamic Republic seems relatively stable for now, but in the longer term, the current establishment's alienation of moderate conservatives and businessmen alongside Iran's baby-boom youth won't do good things for the system's viability. We'll see how Iran's demographics will interact with other social, economic, and political forces in the months and years ahead.