The two-year long pandemic has accelerated or heightened several global trends in society, politics, and economy, trends that were already quite apparent for several years even before the onset of Covid. Some of the most discussed trends are increase in remote work, education, retail, automation, more localization of economy and sourcing, and, paradoxically, decreasing religiosity among the people. Currently, the most consequential and discussed global trend is the ongoing collapse of birth rate all over the world and the prospect of population decline materializing for mankind much sooner than previously anticipated.
Fertility rate, the average number of children per woman, has been falling all over the world in the last two decades. Experts say that the fertility rate should be minimum 2.1 per woman to keep a society at the same population level for the long term. Even by the final decades of the 20th century, fertility rates in most of the developed world have fallen far below the replacement level.
In Japan and Germany, the rate was near or below 1.5 by 1990. By the second decade of the 21st century, below replacement fertility rate is not just a developed world phenomena but increasingly of the developing countries as well. Countries as diverse as Thailand, Iran, Mexico all showed falling and below replacement birth rate even before the pandemic. Birth rate has fallen to such low levels that many developed countries are expected to have only half of the current population by the end of this century.
The pandemic’s effect
The pandemic has only accelerated the declining birth rate as people all over the world have postponed having new children in this time of great stress and uncertainty. A new study now projects that the global population will peak at 9.7 billion by year 2060 and start declining thereafter.
Previous estimate of peak global population was 11 billion. Some experts fear that if the falling trends continue, many countries may experience demographic collapse rather than only decline.
Falling birth rate and consequent demographic decline, are going to affect the society, economy, and politics of countries in the most fundamental ways. Sustained economic development requires a population structure where there are neither too many retired old people nor too many children and unemployed youth. Growth in a national economy is mainly composed of growth in the working population and growth in productivity of workers.
For most of the modern era, across developed and developing countries, population growth accounted for a far greater portion of economic growth than productivity growth through technology. Dwindling supply of working-age youth will most likely condemn aging developed countries to economic stagnation, resulting in a fall in rankings of top economic powers.
Fall in the birth rate is already causing a lot of social changes in rich countries. School and college enrollment are dropping, there is a great shortage of healthcare workers required to take care of the aging retirees, a shortage of service and manual workers for doing difficult jobs. Rural areas are particularly hard hit demographically as most of the youth are migrating to urban centres, leaving the aging and shrinking communities. Plunging birth rate is the main reason countries like Canada, Australia, Germany have increased their legal immigration levels to replenish the working population.
The plunging birth rate is also affecting national politics of countries in significant ways. It has long been observed that demographic decline triggers existential fear among the majority population and makes them more xenophobic, more nationalistic. A lot of the increasing right-wing populism and growing opposition to immigrants and refugees observed across developed countries in recent years can be attributed to demographic fears.
At the same time, economic pragmatism demands that these countries should be welcoming of working-age people from other countries. An answer to this dilemma can be found in another observation that, when a country becomes stricter about controlling borders and the level of illegal immigration, the majority population becomes more tolerant of increased legal immigration.
Bangladesh too has experienced a rapid fall in births in recent decades, with the fertility rate dropping to 2.1 per woman in 2020 from more than 5 per woman in 1980. However, our historically high population density means that negative effects of demographic decline are probably not going to be apparent in the next couple of decades. This means that some of the main drivers of Bangladesh’s economic growth -- labour-intensive manufacturing and export, remittance from low-skilled workers abroad, labour-intensive domestic services and agriculture -- will remain viable for the foreseeable future.
However, Bangladesh is not well-equipped to exploit the opportunities for exporting skilled service workers -- that is going to expand with every passing year -- because of demographic decline. A good national education system, lots of high-quality training and professional institutes, a workforce proficient in communicating in global languages, are the prerequisites necessary to take advantage of this demographic trend. Unfortunately, Bangladesh is severely lacking in all these.
We can see the contrast with the Philippines; the Philippines has a good education system and a very well-trained workforce that is proficient in English. Filipino healthcare workers, teachers, service personnel are in great demand all over the world and the Philippines is one of the world's premier hubs of outsourced business processing, IT servicing, and call-centres.
More than 200,000 Filipino healthcare workers work in developed countries, 90% of their nursing school graduates go abroad for work. Every year, the Philippines earns nearly $40 billion from remittance of skilled workers and nearly $50bn from export of their services. With a birth rate that is higher than even Bangladesh, the Philippines is set to take advantage of the global demographic decline for many years to come.
For Bangladesh to utilize the existing demographic dividend to rise through the ranks of lower middle-income countries, investment in national education, training institutes, and English communication is a no-brainer. In my opinion, de-emphasis of English in education and internal communications was one of the worst national policy decisions in the last five decades. The downside of that decision has already become all too apparent.
Shafiqur Rahman is a political scientist.
