Next April, China will cease to be the most populous country on the planet: with 1,425 million inhabitants it will be surpassed by India, which will reach 1,428 million. It would hardly be a statistical curiosity if it were not for the enormous economic and social implications that this change can unleash worldwide.
Thanks to a population with a broad youthful fringe that, in just half a century, went from poverty to being a great consumer of food, clothing, fuel, household appliances and technology, while being available as cheap labor for large industries; China became the great world economic engine. But since the 1980s, the brake on births has aged its population, weakening the Asian giant’s ability to produce and consume.
Although India, whose population continues to grow at a considerable rate, is able to replace labor and the Chinese market —according to an analysis by the British newspaper The Financial Times, with a GDP that will double in nominal terms in the next decade, India will trigger a fifth of world growth—, what is happening in China is added to other large economies on the planet whose population decreases or stops its increase and, consequently, more and more are made up of older people.
France had the lowest population growth since World War II in 2022, and in Germany the birth rate fell 10 percent compared to the rate it had seven years ago. A situation that has already shaken the trade of some goods, even before the covid-19 pandemic.
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According to a report by the weekly La Croix, between 2015 and 2020, the sale of non-food products for babies in the French market fell 25 percent and that of diapers, 17 percent.
In the United States, the estimate of the birth rate drop was 2 percent per year since 2014, but that figure doubled during the pandemic years. In Russia, the birth rate was above 13 per 1,000 people in 2014, and in 2020 it was below 10. Even in Africa, a region that used to have high birth rates, it is seeing a drop. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the birth estimate was close to 25 points at the beginning of the century, but by 2020 it had dropped to 18.
The decline in the rate of births in the world was already worrying the United Nations at the end of the last decade, before the additional brake that the pandemic brought about. A UN study then added: “In 2018, for the first time in history, people aged 65 and over outnumbered children under five worldwide.” By 2050, some 500 million human beings will be 80 years of age or older.
A smaller number of births generates, in a few years, a higher proportion of elderly people, who stop working, they need the support of a pension and they get sicker, causing a social and economic crossroads. That added to the fact that life expectancy has not stopped increasing. According to the UN, while life expectancy was 51 years in 1960, in 2019, before the pandemic, it exceeded 73 years.
And although, in many countries of the developed world, immigration from the poorest nations has allowed the population to maintain a slight increase, the UN warns that, as expatriates cover different age ranges, immigration does not guarantee that the ideal population pyramid —many young people at the bottom and few older adults at the top— will continue.
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The policy that stopped the birth rate in China
In the late 1970s, the Chinese government, concerned about population growth that threatened to stifle any economic improvement, imposed a policy of strict birth control. Thus, the voluntary interruption of pregnancy became much easier, contraceptive methods became popular and, in the cities of the eastern fringe, which were in full development, authorities determined that couples were only allowed to have one child.
The one-child policy was easily imposed from the following decade, not only because of the strict controls, but because young couples seemed willing to take advantage of the measure to stretch their income, at a time when the Chinese economy was growing, and increased the supply of services and consumer goods.
On the one hand, having only one child became a custom, and on the other, the cost of living increased
Far fewer children were born in China in the decades that followed. Manpower that from now on the country begins to need. And although the authorities understood it a few years ago, when since 2013 they endorsed having a second child and by 2015 they chose to remove any restriction on the limit of descendants, Chinese households did not change their behavior.
“On the one hand, having only one child has become a custom, and on the other, the cost of living has increased in a country where social protection does not exist, health and education are expensive, as is housing, and the pension system is in an embryonic stage”, explains Marc Julienne, a French researcher who is an expert on China at the Ifri Institute.
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Change of mentality and fear of climate change
In European countries, the economic factor also weighs in the decision not to procreate. But it is not the only reason why people delay, sometimes indefinitely, bringing children into the world. Other aspects weigh, such as the voluntary decision of millions of women not wanting to be mothers.
“The structural evolution of the birth rate is much more linked to changes in mentality within the population of childbearing age,” says Laurent Chalard, PhD in Geography from the University of Paris IV and an expert in urban and population issues. Something similar happens in Germany.
Interviewed for a Deutsche Welle special, the gynecologist Christine Biermann assured a few weeks ago that the phrase she hears the most from her patients in Hamburg is that they will have a child only “when circumstances allow me”.
According to Dr. Biermann, among other reasons, women delay their decision to become mothers to avoid interrupting the evolution of their professional career. “The search for better job options is one of the decisive factors for postponing the decision.”
To this we must add that fears for the ravages derived from climate change are a growing factor in refraining from procreating. Many couples consider that bringing a child into the world is almost certainly exposing them to experiencing the environmental collapse of planet Earth.
What happens in Colombia?
In colombia, Birth rates and population aging have undergone a process similar to that of many developed countries. The birth control policies applied since the mid-60s had an effect and avoided, at the time, aggravating problems such as misery and hunger.
In just over half a century, the country’s birth rate fell from 45 births per thousand inhabitants in the mid-1960s to less than 15 at the end of the last decade.
In 1985, only 3.8% of Colombians were over 60 years of age. According to Dane, at the beginning of this decade the percentage exceeded 14 percent, approaching 7 million people. The entity estimates that this rate of aging will be maintained in the coming years.
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Women have entered the labor market, so they decide not to have or have fewer children
ECLAC experts have been warning this for years. In July 2018, researcher Olga Lucía Acosta explained at a meeting organized by the Ministry of Labor in Bogotá that The Colombian population is aging at rates that mean a faster demographic change than estimated.
“This is due to the fact that women have entered the labor market, which is why they decide not to have or have fewer children and even, at a younger age, decide not to want to be mothers. All of this has meant profound changes in the population”, highlighted the expert.
To this we must add that life expectancy in Colombia was significantly lengthened. While in 1960 it was 57 years old, by 2022 it was almost 77. Under this rate of aging of the population, even before the middle of the century, it is probable that there are more older adults than Colombians of working age.
The challenge for social security and pension policy is enormous: if there are more and more people in need of a pension and at the same time fewer people working and making contributions to social security, the collapse of the pension system will be inevitable.
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A projection that represents a serious challenge to the intentions of the current government, whose pension reform project intends —in a commendable way— to grant a pension to all the elderly, even if they never contributed.
In the country, the retirement age is 62 for men and 57 for women. In Europe, that age ranges from 66 to 68 years. For this reason, the phrase of President Gustavo Petro in the sense that “I first resign before raising the retirement age”, although it sounds very popular, it goes against the evidence that a stubborn reality raises.
MAURICIO VARGAS
FOR THE TIME
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