Experts have expressed their concern that Bangladesh could lose its one-time opportunity to reap benefits from the demographic dividend unless the government invested more in projects to improve human resource capital.
The country is expected to reap the benefits of a young population until 2031, after which the trend will reverse and the population will start to age.
“The government should focus on human resource development to generate high employment and productivity during the peak period of demographic transition,” said Christophe Lefranc, UNFPA Asia-Pacific Regional Adviser for Population and Development while presenting a keynote on Global Perspectives on Demographic Dividend at the third session of the concluding day of the two-day high level meeting on south-south and triangular cooperation in Dhaka yesterday.
Demographic dividend is defined as the economic growth potential that can result from shifts in a population’s age structure, mainly when the share of working-age population (15-59 years age) is larger than those of the non-working-age share. Such a scenario helps a country to cut spending on dependents and spur economic growth.
“This one-time window of opportunity should be translated into dividend before the dependency ratio rises again with the elderly population,” said Christophe.
Bellal Hossain, professor of Population Science Department at Dhaka University, said the demographic dividend, which could be reaped between 2011 and 2031, would allow Bangladesh to have a massive, young, productive labour force and 30 years from now, the dependency ratio will still be well below its current level of about 58%.
Till 2031, Bangladesh can potentially reap the benefits of demographic dividend as dependency ratio is expected to decline to 43% by then (2031). But afterwards, the dependency ratio would increase again, says the report.
According to a report prepared by a group of authors, led by Geoffrey Hayes at the University of Waikato, population of Bangladesh is projected to reach 265m from 156m now.
The most dramatic change to be expected in future is the increase in the elderly population, defined conventionally from the age of 60 and over, the report said.
The number of elderly would increase by five times, from 11.2m in 2011 to 55.7m in 2061.
Given that the labour force will be growing at a much slower rate than the elderly population in future, the number of workers per elderly person will decline.
The population aged under 15 years will experience absolute decline from 51.9m in 2-011 to 28.3m in 2061. Under 15 population would increase by about 5m over the 50-year projection period.
