Sometimes ‘connecting the dots’ between different ideas in the development discourse can be a challenge. But as Hans Rosling has highlighted through his famous Gapminder presentations at TED, a picture is really worth a thousand blog posts when it can be used to draw connections and emphasize trends that may not otherwise become apparent.
This is a joint post with Rachel Nugent.
A new report from the US Census Bureau offers the surprising fact that in the next 30 years, the human population over 65 will double. In ten years, there will be more over-65s than under-fives. Old news, you say? Yes, in Italy, Japan, and Russia this is old news. In developing countries, it is new – and somewhat alarming. In 2008, 62 percent of all those aged 65 and over (313 million people) lived in the developing countries of Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Oceania. The elderly population in developing countries is growing twice as fast as in developed countries (on a not very small base in India and China, as it turns out. Those two countries account for 1/3 of the world’s aged population and 37% of the total global population.)
In The Fate of Young Democracies, CGD Visiting Fellow Ethan Kapstein and co-author Nathan Converse attempt to explain why many newly democratized countries experience political reversals. They call these reversals "Major Democratic Transitions"-- a phrase that makes our demographic ears perk up.
"Current population growth is alarming and killing efforts to combat poverty."
- Sufian Ahmed, Ethiopian Minister of Finance and Economic Development
"You can't keep going with a completely upside-down age distribution, with the pyramid standing on its point. You can't have a country where everyone lives in a nursing home."
- Carl Haub, Senior Demographer at the Population Reference Bureau
*This blog was co-authored by Barbara Seligman, consultant to CGD
In an op-ed for the New York Times, Professor Jared Diamond points to consumption differentials between rich and poor countries as the factor responsible for our global sustainability crisis. Diamond says we are running out of resources, and will do so all the faster as developing countries try to "catch up" with rich country consumption levels.