Demographic Transition

Brad Delong links to another uber cool tool from Google.

In particular, the example is great for looking at the so called demographic transition - the link between per capita income growth and population growth. The initial configuration plots fertility versus per capita income for most of the worlds countries. You can set the graphs in motion to see how things have changed over the past 30 years. The tool also allows you to select individual countries and display their tracks. Very interesting cases are China, India, Mauritius, The Bahamas, Korea, Botswana, and Saudi Arabia.

I also like the fact that it pretty clearly seems to show my idea that low fertility precedes rather than follows economic growth. Almost every country with low fertility, however poor, seems to accelerate toward advanced country income levels.

Comments

  1. Anonymous3:36 PM

    Have a look at: http://www.gapminder.org/index.html

    The chicken - egg question might have a slightly different answer...

    Have fun.
    IJ.

    ReplyDelete
  2. IJ - I'm afraid I don't take your point. It was the google version of gapminder I was using to draw my conclusions. I didn't see anything that seemed to contradict that at the site you cited. Perhaps you should be more specific.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous3:05 AM

    If you look at the graph/presentation "Fertility rate and child mortality of all countries 1962-2003" I would go for the primar cause of decreasing fertility is beter medical care (i.e. decreasing children mortality). The link between GDP/capita and fertility is more complex and cannot be demonstrated on a single graph with short time series (e.g. the google version shows only data after 1975 in this case).

    If you were right (i.e. droping fertility causes increase in GDP) then you should actually see "increasing speed" of GDP growth after the fertility dropped.
    What you see in case of China and India (2 most important countries) is constant growth of GDP completely uneffected by fertility rate.
    It is just visual illusion if you "play the movie", because once the fertility drops down, the the trails become "horizontal" and it "seems" that the growth has accelerated, where it has not...

    Certainly more interesting is the graph "children and old per aduld versus GNI" - if you color the dots by income group and run the movie you can spot some disturbing patern in the end for OECD countries = the ratio of kids and pensioners versus working force starts to increase after 1990. One of the key reasons is decrease in fertility below "reproductive level" (I would guess below 2.3 or so) and basically the population is geting older.
    To make it short I would say that:
    "Once the fertility level drops for an extended period of time below certain level (say below 2) you the country GDP/capita will either drop or rise slower for the next generation (say in 30 years time)"...

    Too long, let's continue next time...

    IJ.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous3:26 AM

    From a different perspective:

    If you want a global warming fight with Lubos, you can try to look at the "CO2/GDP" graph.

    Lubos argues, that "On the other hand, there is an almost perfect linear (increasing) relation between the GDP per capita and the CO2 emissions per capita - something that the Kyoto supporters would like to hide from you."
    What he misses is the fact that the graph only shows trivial relationship between welth and consumption (i.e. the more money you have the more you can consume) and does not say anything about the oposit argument (e.g. "the more you consume the more money you have" = what he sees)... If you "play the movie" you will see that USA did double GDP/capita but the CO2 stayed at the same level, i.e. increasing CO2 is not required for GDP growth...

    The extreme case of this is the the internet, where the number of internet users is linearly dependant on GDP == if you try to say that internet is required for GDP growth you are completely missing the "consumption" point (just look at the number of internet connection before 1980...).

    To make it very short:
    GDP has risen for all contries in the past (20-30) years, fertility was decreasing, internet connections increasing, global temperature rising, but this does not mean, that there is direct cause - consequence relationship between those...

    Actually originally I just wanted that you take a look at the www.gapminder.org website - their presentations are impressive...

    IJ.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Its lots of fun, but looking at it by region is somewhat different. Most of Europe/Cen Asia is pretty flat on fertility but with a huge spread on income. Most of the high-fertility low-income is a big blob from sub-saharan africa which wouldn't correlate well within itself. Etc.

    ReplyDelete
  6. IJ - I don't see it. China's growth did not become significant until its fertility became very low. India's fertility rate has dropped less and more slowly - and its growth is slower.

    I agree though, that longer time series would be useful.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Note that China's fertility rate was 5.6 in the 1960's, and that it was one of the poorest nations on Earth at that point. The plummeting of its fertility rate to about 2 took place at the very start of its explosive growth.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anti-Libertarian: re-post

Uneasy Lies The Head

Book Review: Anaximander By Carlo Rovelli