Tag: Demography

China’s Cities Need More Babies, But One Child Policy Still Rules the Provinces

Painted image of chinese children on a space rocket. Image: wackystuff/Flickr

This article was originally published by The Conversation on 6 February, 2015.

After 35 years of consistently strict government control over family size, China’s so-called “one child policy” seems to be winding down – at least for some. Recent headlines quote the authorities in Shanghai going so far as to plead with their residents to “have more children”.

To the policy’s many critics, this is long overdue: China faces an ageing population, epitomised by the four grandparent, two parent, one child family, and couples all over the country are simultaneously looking after their child and two sets of elderly parents.

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Peak Youth – Seizing the Moment

School kids smiling for the camera in Nakempte, Ethiopia. Image: Tim & Annette Gulick/Wikimedia

This article was originally published by IRIN on 25 November 2014.

We have accepted the concept “peak oil” – the point where oil production goes into an irreversible decline. Now we are being asked to contemplate that we are also rapidly approaching “peak youth”, when there will be more young people than ever before in the history of the planet, and when young people as a proportion of the population will reach a maximum, before starting to drop.

The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) reckons there are already 1.8 billion people aged 10-24 in the world. In its annual report it presents them as a great force for accelerated development and a better quality of life, but only if the demographic changes going on can be harnessed for good.

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The Missing Link in Understanding Global Trends? Demography

Population density. Data from the G-Econ project gecon.yale.edu/
Image: Anders Sandberg/Flickr

This article was originally published on 11 August 2014 by New Security Beat, the blog of the Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP) at the Wilson Center.

Since the end of World War II, a number of the world’s most dramatic political events have resulted from demographic shifts and government reaction to them. Despite this, political demography remains a neglected topic of scholarly investigation.

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