By Steve Sailer
06/25/2022
While the necessity of abortion in the West is being propounded, from the Future Development blog of the World Bank and Brookings Institution:
Are Africa’s children our last hope to save us from demographic decline?
Wolfgang Fengler Thursday, June 23, 2022
This blog was first launched in September 2013 by the World Bank and the Brookings Institution in an effort to hold governments more accountable to poor people and offer solutions to the most prominent development challenges.
in 2010, I asked the following question in one of my blogs: “Can rapid population growth be good for economic development?” It quickly became the most read blog in World Bank history, as it was part of a broader controversy. At the time, most people still believed the world had an “overpopulation problem” and adhered to some version of the Malthus theorem or Paul Ehrlich’s “population bomb” theory. However, a handful of people, including Hans Rosling, Shanta Devarajan, and me, saw a very different story emerging from the data. …
Let’s illustrate that point by looking at South Africa and Japan. Both countries have almost the same number of children (ages 0-14), with Japan around 15 million and South Africa around 17 million. However, while Japan has 110 million adults (ages 15+) against South Africa’s 43 million, South Africa’s unemployment rate is ten times as high (30 percent) as in Japan (3 percent). Clearly, South Africa has an unemployment problem, but it is not driven by demography (see Figure 1).
Huh?
… The only exception is Africa, which will add around 100 million children (from 550 million to 650 million) to the world population by 2050….
With improvements in health and sanitation, Africa’s population growth will be even higher in the short to medium term. I believe this is a good thing, as this population growth is driven by adults. African economies could benefit from an education dividend as a larger cohort of parents invests more (resources and attention) in fewer children. In turn, as African kids “skill up” and gain access to digital value chains, they will find opportunities to work in tradable services. In an optimistic scenario, this education dividend will eventually result in a jobs dividend. If that happens, the projected global demographic imbalance can become an opportunity for Africa. Firms in need of talent will find Francophone and Anglophone native speakers only a click away. Investing in Africa will help both development and the bottom line.
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