Demography and population

MASSIMO LIVI-BACCI

Three centuries and a ten-fold increase

Among the phenomena that have changed the face of the planet in modern times, population dynamics is perhaps the best known.

Population change can be interpreted as the result of the continuous confrontation and adaptation between the forces of constraint and the forces of choice. Forces of constraint are the environment, space and land, energy, diseases, and material resources. Forces of choice are the ability to modulate and control behaviors that have demographic consequences, such as entering into a reproductive union; having children; protecting and enhancing health with adequate nutrition, housing, and clothing; moving and migrating from one place to another.

This trend shows several broad features. First, and foremost, is the enor­mous acceleration of the rate of growth, from about three per thousand population per year in the eighteenth century, to five per thousand in the nineteenth and thirteen per thousand in the twentieth century (Table 7.1).^[112] Second, this rising global trend is not uniform among regions and continents: indeed in Europe and North America the rate of growth peaked during the nineteenth century, while in Latin America, Asia, and Africa it peaked in the twentieth. Third, the overall results greatly differ in the various continents: between 1700 and 2010, population multiplied by a factor of six in Europe, by a factor of ten in Asia and Africa, and by a factor of eighty in the Americas. And, accordingly, the geo-demography of the world has greatly changed: America housed slightly less than 2 percent of world population in 1700 and almost 14 percent in 2010; Europe's share peaked in 1900 at about one-quarter of world population, falling to ιι percent in 2010; Africa's share fell from 16 percent in 1700 to about 8 percent in the second half of the nineteenth century, bouncing back to 15 percent in 2010. Fourth, in the first decade of the twenty-first century the geographical variability of population dynamics is at its zenith: while Europe seems on a declining path, the popula­tion of Africa is growing more than 2 percent per year. Summing up: modern demography has been characterized by an extraordinary acceleration with a variety of geographical patterns, and this variety increases the smaller the scale of analysis.

Rate of increase (per thousand)

Sources: 1700-1900: Elaboration on J.-N.

Demographic systems

In order to gain a better understanding of modern population change, two interlinked and partially overlapping approaches will be followed. The first will attempt to outline the nature of the demographic systems prevailing in different parts of the world in the eighteenth century. Land, space, resources, food, microbes, and disease defined the narrow path along which pre-industrial populations grew. These populations established demographic systems that, while often very different one from the other, shared a low rate of growth. A demographic system can be described as a relatively stable set of interdependent demographic behaviors - marriage, reproduction, survival, mobility - that determine the rate of population change. Different “combinations” of behaviors can produce similar rates of increase, as would happen for two populations, the first characterized by high mortality, early marriage, and high fertility; and the second marked by low mortality, late marriage, and moderate fertility. Systems are not fixed and change in response to the modifications of external constraints, such as the availability of new land, innovation and productivity, modifications in the incidence of disease, and the like.

The second approach presents the factors that determine a change or a transformation of a demographic system, therefore affecting population development. In modern times the gradual change in demographic systems has produced a transition from high to low levels of fertility and mortality, a process that goes under the name of “demographic transition,” and which has followed modalities and time patterns peculiar to each individual geographi­cal and social setting. Although the eighteenth century marked the beginning of the modern acceleration of population growth, demographic systems around the world remained conditioned by a low expectation of life and by a high level of fertility that determined a rate of growth normally well below i percent per year, but that allowed for significantly different patterns in different societies.

Figure 7.1 shows several “isogrowth” curves. Each curve is the locus of those points that combine life expectancy (the abscissa) and number of children per woman (the ordinate) to give the same rate of growth r. Included on this graph are points corresponding to historical and contem­porary populations. For the former, life expectancy is neither below twenty, as this would be incompatible with the continued survival of the population, nor above thirty-five, as no historical population ever approached that level until recently. For similar reasons, the number of children per woman falls between eight, almost never exceeded in nor­mally constituted populations, and four, a minimum for populations not practicing birth control. The figure reports, left to right, four areas, three ellipses, and one round in shape; each of these areas represents the locus of populations belonging to different epochs. The first ellipse is the locus of historical populations before the Industrial Revolution and the modern diffusion of birth control. These populations fall mostly within a band that extends from growth rates of 0 to 1 percent, a space of growth typical of

pre-modern times. Within this narrow band, however, the fertility and mortality combinations vary widely, although constrained by the systemic poverty of resources and of knowledge. Denmark at the end of the eight­eenth century and India a century later, for example, had similar growth rates, but these were achieved at different points in the space described: the former example combines high life expectancy (high for the times, about forty years) and a small number of children (just over four), while in the latter case low life expectancy (about twenty-five years) is paired with many children (just under seven).

The second ellipse contains the populations during the process of demo­graphic transition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The third ellipse outlines the situation at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when countries with very high fertility (many in Sub-Saharan Africa) coexist with other countries (in Europe and Southeast Asia) with abnormally low fertility, close to one child per woman. It must be remarked that in the much expanded space of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries there are populations with implicit growth rates of 3 percent, and other populations with negative growth rates of-2 percent; the former doubles in twenty-three years, and the latter declines by half in thirty-five years. Two populations of equal size experiencing these different growth rates will find themselves after thirty-five years (about a generation) in a numerical ratio of six to one! However, this is the space of populations in transition, unstable, and often with unsustainable paces of growth.

The fourth space, circular in shape, is the hypothetical region of the future, after the transition and at the end of a process of convergence, with an expectation of life above eighty, fertility between one and three children per woman, and potential rates of growth comprised between -ι and +1 percent. These populations could alternate phases of growth and decline.

The eighteenth century

During the eighteenth century - the first phase of the modern accelera­tion of population increase - China and America attained a higher rate of growth (about 0.7 percent) than Europe (0.4 percent) and the rest of Asia (0.3 percent), while Africa stagnated or declined. Consider the case of China, whose population doubled between 1700 and 1800, and stag­nated during much of the nineteenth centry. A few contemporary authors have underlined the plasticity of the Chinese demographic system able to adapt to external constraints with a variety of mechanisms.^[113] In the first place, infanticide permitted the regulation, at family level, of the number and gender of offspring. The incidence of infanticide - mainly of baby girls - was high, reaching 10 percent for the children of women belonging to the imperial lineage. The interpretation is that infanticide was a response to the fluctuations in living conditions and opportunities for family advancement.

Selective infanticide, and the higher mortality of surviving baby girls owing to child neglect, generated distortions of the marriage market in the form of a scarcity of eligible women; their scarcity was made worse by occasional polygyny and by the low frequency of remarriage among young widows. The result was that almost all women married very young, while men married substantially later and a high proportion remained unmarried. The proportion of women between age fifteen and fifty who were married was much higher in Asia than in Europe (typically 90 percent against 60 percent or less). This system of almost universal marriage for women was itself articulated in a variety of institutional forms, adaptable to different circumstances: beside the largely dominant patrilocal form (the new couple co-resided with the husband's family), there were alternative forms of uxorilocal type, forms of levirate marriage (for the very poor), polygyny (for the wealthy), and adoptions of baby girls who became spouses of a member of the adoptive family. The high proportion of married women was balanced by a level of fertility - within marriage - lower than in Europe. The total number of children born to women married at age twenty (and remaining married until age fifty) was around six, against 7.5 or more for European women. Birth intervals were longer than for European women and the age at birth of the last child lower. Not extraneous to the low marital fertility may have been a philosophical and religious tradition prescribing sexual continence for the spouses. Finally, adoption had a relevance in the Chinese family system and a proportion of children - up to 10 percent - were raised by an adoptive family. Adoptions were extended to adolescents and even adults. Combining marriage con­trol, marital restraint, infanticide, and adoption, “Chinese individuals con­stantly adjusted their demographic behavior according to collective circumstances to maximise collective utility.”^[114]

In the case of Japan, under the Tokugawa dynasty (1603 to 1868), the period before 1720 was characterized by an extension of cultivated land and a shift from extensive to intensive agricultural techniques; traditional social structures altered and large family groups, including many relatives and servants who were generally unable to marry, were broken up and many independent families established.^[115] However, in the second part of the Tokugawa period, Japan's population stagnated, and in 1870 was about 35 million; the causes and mechanisms of this stagnation are the subject of considerable debate. There is definite evidence of intentional control of the “production” of children, not so much by delaying marriage but by the practices of abortion and infanticide, and of a “destructive” role played by the cities with regard to the rural population surplus. (Edo, today Tokyo, was the largest city in the world at the beginning of the nineteenth century.) Beyond infanticide and abortion, another interesting explanation for the slow population growth of the late Tokugawa epoch and the Meiji epoch that followed is the well-documented agricultural transformation that took place and led to an ever greater intensification of farming methods. This transformation improved the general conditions of rural life but also brought with it a notable increase in workloads for men and even more for women. This trend probably had a depressing effect on marital fertility, and may have offset some of the favorable demographic effects of long-term agrarian development.^[116] Whatever the explanation for the demographic stagnation, Japanese society gradually discovered mechanisms to limit demographic growth as the expansion of cultivation encountered natural and insuperable limits.

The case of the Americas in the eighteenth century is extraordinary. Three major lines of development must be noted. First, the well-known catastrophic decline of the Native American population was coming to an end in the more densely settled areas (Mesoamerica, the Andes) and a recovery had begun. Second, the forced immigration of African slaves reached a peak during the century - almost 60 percent of the roughly ιι million slaves who were brought in chains to the American shores after 1500 arrived during the eighteenth century.^[117] But that massive in flow was neces­sary in order to offset the very high mortality among slave populations, and their low fertility due to the many obstacles to marriages, unions, and family life. The demographic plight of the black population was particularly acute in the Caribbean and Brazil, where living and working conditions on the plantations were extremely hard. The third point to note is the growth of the European component of the population of the Americas because of immigration and also a high natural growth rate. Those Europeans who settled in rural areas, where large families were helpful to the success of immigrants, featured especially fast growth. High fertility, large families, and lower mortality than in Europe led to sustained rapid population growth. Mortality in French Quebec, for example, was lower than in France because of the favorable environment - lower density, which was less conducive to the diffusion of epidemics, better nutrition, and the selection for youth and good health resulting from migration. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the indigenous population of the Americas had become a minority with less than 40 percent of the total population; the white component had surpassed one-quarter of the total and the black approached one-fifth, while the rest was composed of com­plex admixtures of the major ethnic groups.^[118]

The impact that the heavy outflow of slaves had on the demography of Africa, whose population stagnated during the eighteenth century, remains uncertain. This outflow of enslaved was directed to the American shores, but to a lesser extent also northward and eastward to Mediterranean and Asian destinations. It is likely that the effects of the outflow, composed of millions of men and women in the prime of life, were notable and lasting, but quantitative evidence on African population history is too scarce to permit firm conclusions.

The course of European population during the eighteenth century is much better known than elsewhere: there are censuses, vital statistics, and many precise reconstitutions of demographic dynamics for many areas. Total population increased some 55 percent between 1700 and 1800, but with relatively large regional differences: Russia increased by 140 percent, northern and central Europe by 60 percent, France, Italy, and Spain by 33 percent.^{[119] [120]} Marriage was at the heart of different European demographic systems. In most of Europe marriage sanctioned the right to reproduce and births outside marriage represented a small proportion of total births. The unmarried state was almost everywhere an insurmountable obstacle to reproduction, hence marriage was the supreme regulator for births in societies that had not yet discovered and adopted voluntary control of fertility.11 Fertility - the total number of children born to the average woman - would be affected by nuptiality: an increase (or a decline) in the mean age at marriage of two years would normally translate into one fewer child (or one additional one). And compared to a society in which all adults married, a society with one-fifth or one-quarter of adults never marrying would (all other factors remaining constant) produce one-fifth or one-quarter fewer children. The regulating function of marriage operated through the “modulation” of the age at marriage and through the exclusion from marriage of a varying proportion of each cohort. At the end of the eighteenth century, Europe was more or less divided by a line that ran from St Petersburg to Trieste.^{[121] [122]} West of the line, high age at first marriage (above age twenty-four for women and above twenty-six for men) prevailed, and a high proportion of adults never married (generally over 10 percent, often around 20 percent). The dominant system east of the line consisted of more or less universal marriage, average age at first marriage below twenty-two for women and twenty-four for men, and a percentage never married less than 5 percent. The geography was more complicated in the Mediterranean countries, with low marriage rates in some areas (Atlantic coast of the Iberian peninsula, alpine region, and central sharecropping areas in Italy and Sardinia), but higher rates elsewhere. The low nuptiality of Western Europe is often interpreted as the consequence of a long process of Malthusian adaptation - initiated after the late medieval acute plague pandemic - to increasing density and urbanization, scarcity of land, and increasing prices of basic staples. Other factors marked the demographic systems of Europe in the eighteenth century: for instance, much of the lowland Mediterranean region and the Balkans was plagued by malaria (which also affected a few areas of northern and central Europe) and mortality was significantly higher, and natural growth lower, than in malaria-free lands. Customary practices of childbearing and lactation, which varied across Europe, influenced both women's fertility and child mortality. Long breastfeeding and late weaning would increase birth inter­vals, lower fertility, and enhance children's chances of survival. As an example, in the second half of the eighteenth century, infant mortality in France was far higher than that of England (273 against 165 / 1000), corre­sponding to a difference in expectation of life at birth (other factors held constant) of four years. 1³

Features of the modern demographic transition

It has become customary to define demographic transition as the process that has reduced mortality and fertility from the high pre-nineteenth-century levels to the low and very low ones that prevail nowadays in Europe, America, and East Asia. With the Industrial Revolution the benefits of scientific knowledge and eventually of rising living standards provided the basis for declining mortality: towards the close of the nineteenth century expectation of life had reached fifty years in several countries of Europe and was rapidly increasing elsewhere in those parts of the world that we now define as “developed.”^[123]

Conceptually, three overlapping sets of factors combined in this process of mortality decline. The first is an increase of per capita material resources, particularly food, and a remarkable decline of subsistence crises and asso­ciated mortality crises. This implied an improvement in the standards of nutrition, clothing, housing, hygiene, and of the associated ability to resist disease. The second is the gradual accumulation of knowledge about mi­crobial transmission - particularly after Louis Pasteur's (1822-1895) discov­eries in the 1860s - and its popular dissemination through education and public policies, which enabled more individuals to avoid disease. The third step involved the development of vaccines and drugs able to prevent or cure disease, a phase that began (putting aside the isolated discovery of smallpox vaccination by Edward Jenner in 1796) in the last two decades of the nine­teenth century.

The decline of mortality triggered the decline of fertility, through the diffusion of voluntary fertility control. At a very general level of explana­tion, the decline of fertility is a response to the changing balance of costs and benefits of children, determined by the changing priorities of society. Increasing costs were generated by the decline of infant and child mortal­ity, that implied (at a given level of fertility) more surviving children per family. But increasing costs were also determined by urbanization and industrialization that required more investments in children, particularly in terms of education; and because mothers renounced gainful employ­ment in the market in order to look after the children. Decreasing benefits were the consequence of more complex techniques of production and of the shift from agriculture to manufacturing that delayed the age at which children became a source of income for the family. This broad scheme may be useful at a very general level of explanation, since many other factors - particularly those related to the changing sets of cultural values brought about by the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, radicalism, socialism, and other mass movements - combine in explaining the time patterns and geographical gradient of the fertility decline. Improved communication aided the spread of birth control practices from city to countryside, from the upper to the lower classes, and from the more central to the peripheral regions.

Population historians still debate why fertility control started in France, which in the latter part of the eighteenth century was still a rural society, and not in Britain. Despite its early industrialization, fertility control came to Britain only a century later. Many scholars believe that changes in values have prevailed over cost-benefit considerations. Moreover, the view that mortality decline is a necessary antecedent of the decline of fertility is also in dispute, considering the fact that cases where the contrary has happened appear to exist. But in general, during this long process of demographic transition, the rate of natural growth (the differ­ence between the birth and death rates) - that was a fraction of ι percent in high mortality regimes - tends to increase. The curve representing the falling mortality precedes in time that of the falling fertility, so that until both stabilize at a low level, the rate of growth tends to increase, reaches a peak, and then declines (Fig. 7.2). The duration of the transition, the steepness of the two curves, and the distance between them varied considerably from country to country. Population increase during the transitional phase is a function of these parameters. In the Western countries, where the modern decline of mortality started early and progressed slowly, in tune with the gradual accumulation of medical knowledge, the transition lasted longer than in the rest of the world, where the decline of mortality dates from the early or mid-twentieth century and has progressed rapidly, taking advantage - so to speak - of the capital of knowledge already accumulated.

Mortality and fertility transition in the Global North

Mortality transition in Western countries came relatively slowly. Increasing agricultural productivity, the introduction of new crops, improved

Figure 7.2 Demographic transition model

communication, and better functioning markets contributed to a decline in famines and subsequent epidemics. Crises did not disappear, as testified by the deadly Great Famine of Ireland 1845-1846, and by many other episodes, particularly in the periphery of Europe - Finland, Russia, the Balkans.^[124] But mortality slowly declined. The date at which female life expectancy reached fifty (at which level a cohort's losses due to mortality between birth and the onset of reproductive age is still considerable, between 20 and 25 percent, and the “waste” of reproductive potential is about 30 percent) varies between 1861 for Norway and the 1930s for Bulgaria, Portugal, and the Soviet Union. The median date for European countries is 1903. Gains in survival peaked in the first half of the twentieth century, when about four or five months of life expec­tancy were added in every calendar year - despite the ravages of two world wars. By 1950, excluding the USSR, expectation of life in Europe had reached - for both men and women - sixty-seven years, and by 2010, eighty years.

In the eighteenth century marriage was a central piece of the European demographic system, as discussed earlier, but its function as a regulator of the birth rate was of limited use in a society - such as the one that developed during the nineteenth century - where survival was improving and families sought better control over the number of their children. Only voluntary regulation of marital fertility would do, a behavior that in the eighteenth century was limited to the aristocracies and to urban bourgeois and merchant elites. As said before, marital fertility control became widespread in France in the last third of the eighteenth century, well before it did in the rest of Europe. The point at which marital fertility registered a 10 percent drop relative to a previous stable level (and without subsequent increases) is an empirical indicator that an irreversible decline has set in. This date is an important moment in the demographic transition and signals the substitution of the traditional system of fertility regulation (marriage) with a new one (contraception). It occurred first in France, in 1827, and last in European Russia and Ireland, in 1922 - almost a century later. For Belgium, Denmark, Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland the date falls between 1880 and 1900; for Sweden, Norway, Austria, and Hungary between 1900 and 1910; and for Italy, Greece, Finland, Portugal, and Spain between 1910 and 1920. A more detailed appraisal of the geography of the diffusion of voluntary fertility control reveals a process of decline which began in France and spread to the more developed regions of Europe, including Catalonia, Piedmont, Liguria, and Tuscany in the south; and England, Belgium, Germany, and Scandinavia in the center-north; subsequently it reached Eastern Europe and the other regions of southern Europe. The most periph­eral regions (some areas of Mediterranean Europe, the Balkans, Ireland) and areas geographically central but culturally traditional (certain areas of the Alps) were the last strongholds of high fertility, gradually conquered in the middle of the last century.

The simple tenets of the demographic transition, that imply that after the secular fall of mortality and fertility some sort of stability and equilibrium is reached and maintained, do not fit a much more complex reality. Since the 1980s in much of Europe, and in Japan, fertility has fallen well below replacement, while mortality continues to fall at older ages.^[125] Age structures have undergone profound changes and in many of these countries the number of persons above seventy years of age is higher than the number below age fifteen; the number of grandparents surpasses the number of grandchildren. Were it not for sustained immigration, populations would fall. Nor it is clear - in spite of a modest recovery of fertility in recent years - if and when a natural demographic equilibrium will be re-established.

During the long nineteenth century, the pace of migration and mobility quickened. In Europe the open and sparsely inhabited spaces that had pre­viously attracted immigration and settlement had filled up. The “new worlds” outside of Europe that had received a steady trickle of migration over the previous three centuries had by now entered firmly into the European sphere of action - in spite of the dissolution of the American colonies - and were tied to Europe by institutional, cultural, religious, and linguistic affinities. Other worlds opened to migrants in Australia and South Africa, regions that were both rich in land and natural resources but sparsely populated and so open to European expansion.

To better understand the long-distance migration of nineteenth-century Europe, it will be useful to consider some of the demographic, social, and economic changes on which it depended. The first ingredient was rapid population growth, especially in the countryside. That growth combined with gradually increasing agricultural productivity to produce an ever-larger segment of underpaid or unemployed rural labor. At the same time, the industrial sector grew and so attracted and offered employment to those excess rural workers. Transport costs fell, due to railroads and steamships, making migration a more practical option for millions. Finally, the accelera­tion of global economic integration created a system that sought to achieve equilibrium without attention to national borders. These phenomena are all connected and none by itself (or joined to just one of the others) could have precipitated the mass migrations of the nineteenth century. And massive they were: between the beginning of the nineteenth century and the end of the First World War about 50 million Europeans emigrated across the oceans (from a population that in 1800 numbered approximately 188 million). This amounts to a rate several dozen times greater than the net migration that took place during any of the three previous centuries. This large and systemic phenomenon had an impact on the entire European continent, as well as the many lands to which Europeans went.

The population of the Global South

As the rich countries of the world completed their cycle of population expansion, the poor countries embarked upon an extraordinary one of their own. The characteristics of this growth cycle are well described by the dry figures charting recent demographic growth in the so-called less-developed

Table 7.2 Population of less developed and more developed countries, 1900­

2010

Rate of increase

Population (million) (per 1,000) Percent distribution

* Note: Rate of increase over the previous date

Source: For 1900, author's estimates. 1920-2010, United Nations,World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision (New York, 2011)

countries. The 1900 population of the poor countries, about 1 billion, had multiplied more than five-fold by the year 2012; in little more than a century, these countries have exceeded the expansion of the rich ones in the two centuries following the Industrial Revolution. That speed of growth is extraordinary. Between 1900 and 1920, the estimated growth rate of the poor countries was about 0.6 percent per year; this rate doubled for the period 1920-1950 (about 1.2 percent) and once again between 1950 and 1980 (2.3 percent) after reaching its zenith in the 1960s. In the 1980s the rate ofincrease fell to 2.1 percent, to 1.8 in the 1990s, and 1.5 in the first decade of the present century (Table 7.2). By contrast, the Western countries (Europe and its overseas projections) only rarely exceeded a rate of 1 percent during their two centuries of expansion. Since the 1950s the poorer part of the world has grown at twice that rate.

The reasons for this difference are, on the surface, rather simple, though the underlying reality is complex. In the rich world, the demographic transi­tion came about slowly as a result of a gradual decline in mortality, followed eventually by a similar decline in fertility. Slow mortality decline was the result of an accumulation of knowledge (especially medical knowledge, which helped to bring infectious diseases under control) beginning at the end of the nineteenth century and continuing up to the present day. In the poor world, mortality levels remained high until recently. In 1950, for example, average life expectancy in poor countries was still around forty. However, from the mid-twentieth century onward, the knowledge slowly accumulated by the rich countries was rapidly transferred to the poor ones and mortality dropped dramatically. Fertility, largely dependent upon slowly changing cultural factors, either did not follow the trend in mortality or else did so slowly after a lag, during which time population burgeoned.

As mentioned above, the apparent simplicity of this process is misleading. The poor world is divided into societies characterized by vastly different environmental, cultural, and political settings, and these differences are reflected in the demographic behavior of individual populations. Nor has the poor world been isolated from the rich, so that a degree of knowledge and technology transfer took place before the 1950s. Still, taking these factors into account, the fact remains that demographic change in the poor world in recent decades has on average proceeded rapidly as compared to the path previously followed by the rich (Table 7.3).

The demography of developing countries - around 1950 - was much more homogeneous than it is today, when variation is at its maximum as a consequence of the differing economic, political, and cultural developments of the last six decades. Taking into consideration the main regions, in 1950­1955, expectation of life ranged between thirty-eight and forty-five years, and in 2005-2010 between fifty-five and seventy-four. For fertility, in 1950-1955 the average number of children per woman was between 5.7 and 6.4, as against i.6 and 4.6 in 2005-2010. India and China had the same fertility in 1950-1955 (6.1 and 6.0), but in 1990-1995 Indian women still had an average of 3.7 children, while Chinese ones were already below replacement (2.0). Thus what had been a consistent demographic regime across the poor world in 1900, showed wide variety by 2000.

The speed of development and of societal transformation is obviously at the base of the demographic revolution in poor countries. But also the modes of development have profoundly affected the nature of the demo­graphic transition. For instance, with respect to mortality, Cuba, Chile, and South Korea had approximately the same high expectation of life (between seventy-eight and seventy-nine years) in the year 2000, but the real income per capita of Chile was four times that of Cuba and the real income of South Korea one-and-a-half times that of Chile. At the same date, the three countries also had the same very low fertility, well below replacement. Improvement in the satisfaction of basic needs - food, energy, water, sanitation - at a very low level of development, has been strategic for curbing very high mortality. So has been the option of investing in basic

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Table 7.3 Demographic indicators of world population (1950-2010)

Source: United Nations, World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision (New York, 2011)

health care. Policies have also had negative impacts, the most tragic exam­ple being that of the Great Leap Forward in China, which resulted in disaster and in the losses of tens of millions of lives in 1959-1961.^[126]

Investment in human capital, improvement in the education of women, democratization of family relations, and encouragement to women's employment have all been conducive to a more careful control of fertility. So too have been the consequences of policies improving maternal and child health and facilitating access to contraception. These considerations show that, independently from the speed of the accumulation of material resources and of the development of services (which find a convenient synthesis in the indicators of income, such as GDP per capita), choices of policies have had a considerable impact on the demography of the developing world. Extreme coercive policies - such as those enacted in China after 1980 and centered around the “one child” model - have accelerated the fertility transition in countries that have imposed them.

In contrast, pro-natalist policies, whether in the Global South, where they have been rare, or in the Global North, where they have been less rare, have normally had weak impacts on human choices and national populations. The Soviet Union in Stalin's day, fascist Italy, imperialJapan, postwar France, and several other countries have experimented with various rewards for big families, but the masses typically disappointed their leaders. Romania in the mid-1960s was one brief exception, where state policies (the outlawing of all manner of birth control) doubled fertility from one year to the next. But exuberant fertility in Romania did not last. The stubborn resistance of modern populations to policies intended to make them reproduce faster shows the strength of the global (but not quite universal) trend towards smaller families, lower fertility, and slower population growth.

The present and into the future

At the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the world demographic system is profoundly changed. The geo-demography of the world has undergone a deep revolution as summarized in Table 7.2: devel­oped countries' share of the world population between 1950 and 2010 has fallen from 32 to 18 percent and that of Europe from 22 to 11 percent; the United Kingdom and Italy were listed among the ten most populous coun­tries in 1950 but are below twenty-first place in the 2010 ranking; the population living in the urban areas, less than one-third of the world popu­lation in 1950, is now a majority; almost everywhere, population has con­centrated along the coastal areas and low-lying valleys, challenging environmental equilibrium. Environmental constraints - pollution, the increasing concentration of greenhouse emissions, climate change, shortages of fertile soil and fresh water - are much stronger than in the past.

But nonetheless, individuals in most parts of the world have largely freed themselves from several of the biological, material, and social constraints of the past. Individuals have more freedom of choice about getting married (and dissolving marriages), having children, or migrating. Their health and long­evity is much improved. This process is far from completed in many parts of the world, but today individuals are in a better position to take care of themselves, of their families, of their communities, than were their ancestors in 1900 or 1800.

Population change is strongly conditioned by forces of inertia, and projec­tions give a reasonable idea of future developments for the next few decades. It is interesting to speculate about what the future might have in store: recent estimates are based on the experts' consensus that implies, for developing countries, a continuation of the decline of fertility (from 2.7 children per woman in 2005-2010 to 2.2 in 2045-2050) and a further improvement in longevity (from a life expectancy of sixty-six to one of seventy-four over the same period). For the developed countries, the projections call for a mild recovery of fertility and further gains in life expectancy. Global population surpassed 7 billion in 2012, and will reach 8 billion in 2025 and 9 billion in 2043; many long-term scenarios imply that the 10 billion mark will be reached at the close of the century. The rate of growth will decline from 1.3 percent in 2005-2010 to 0.4 percent in 2045-2050 - approximately the level of the eight­eenth century, at the beginning of the modern cycle of growth. Practically the entire increase from 2010 and 2050 will accrue to the population of the developing countries, and the population of the developed ones will remain stationary: in 2050 their share of the total world population will have decreased to 14.ι from 17.9 percent in 2010. India will outstrip China as the world's most populous country in the 2020s. The most stunning develop­ment, however, is the expected further increase of Africa's share, from 14.8 percent in 2010 to 23.6 percent in 2050.

But, demographers' predictions notwithstanding, the future course of population is far from certain. The basic notion that all societies of the world are proceeding along converging demographic paths, conforming to the model of demographic transition, and heading towards a situation of

general equilibrium around a stationary or semi-stationary population is unrealistic.

First, it is unwise to assume that longevity will continue to grow. The Soviet sphere proved unable to maintain the general conditions (nutrition, health care) achieved in the three decades after the end of the Second World War. Indeed, the changing priorities in investment at the end of the Soviet regime, together with the social and economic aftershocks following the end of the USSR, provoked a serious deterioration of life expectancy after 1990, especially among males. On the other hand, a new emerging disease - AIDS - brought a decline of life expectancy in many Sub-Saharan areas in the 1980s and 1990s.^[127] Thus unanticipated biological and socio-political developments undermined the expectations of further continuous progress in longevity. In Western countries and Japan, high life expectancy depends on universal access to high quality health care, and the proportion of GDP invested on health is every­where on the rise (10 percent in Europe, 16 percent in the USA in 2009).^[128] Inability of the system to keep up with rising costs would probably affect health and reduce longevity. In any case, the easy and most effective measures to prolong lives, such as sanitation and vaccination programs, are already widely in place. Further increase in life expectancy beyond what these measures have delivered will be more difficult, more expensive, and more reversible. Moreover, it is not impossible that devastating pandemics could outmaneuver public health systems, as HIV has done in southern Africa, and upset all demographic expectations. These considerations - biological, political, eco­nomic - suggest that further improvement in longevity should not be taken for granted.

Even more uncertain than longevity's trajectory is the future course of fertility. And fertility is the main driving force shaping aggregate population cycles. First, many developed countries during the last three or four decades have stagnated well below replacement fertility, normally understood as an average of 2.1 births per woman over her lifetime. Among the more populous countries, this is the case in Russia, Japan, Germany, Italy, and Spain, where around 2010 women had on average between 1.2 and 1.4 children. Perseverance of these fertility patterns implies rapid aging, numerical distortions between generations, population decline, and high demand for immigration. Many countries of the Global South are also already below replacement fertility (China most conspicuously, but also Iran, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Brazil, Chile, and Cuba) and may follow the patterns set by the more developed societies cited above. Second, there are countries where fertility is very high, and voluntary control is still restricted to the wealthier strata of the population: in Sub-Saharan Africa women have more than five children on average (2005­2010). In other regions, an initial fertility decline has stalled at relatively high levels. Economic stagnation and reversals, inefficient social policies, abandon­ment of population policies supporting fertility regulation, and resistance to change of traditional family and community values, may all invalidate one of the main predictions on future trends. This prediction postulates that once fertility decline has begun, there is a sort of irreversible, self-sustaining process, until low levels, around replacement, are reached. This expectation could prove wrong, so that three or four decades from now, the anticipated conver­gence of reproductive behaviors - low fertility for all - may fail to take place.

Migration cannot affect future aggregate world trends. But it will certainly influence regional and national changes. Net flows of migrants appear to be on the rise. The current phase of globalization has different characteristics from that of a century ago. The economic integration among countries has proceeded at high speed: in 1950 the value of the goods exchanged in international markets was about one-tenth of global GNP, against one- quarter today. The human transfers among countries, regions, and conti­nents are - in relative numbers - now lower than they were in the previous phase of globalization, however. This may sound surprising in the face of the palpable migratory pressures that are developing in the poor world, the growing absolute numbers of migrants, and the many efforts that the rich world is making to contain migratory pressures, but the larger total global population makes it so. In absolute numbers, migration is rising. The net flow of migrants from the poor world to the rich was 7 million in the decade of the 1960s; it approximately doubled to 13 million in the 1970s and 1980s, doubled again to 26 million in the 1990s, and has reached 34 million in the 2000-2010 decade.^[129] In addition, there are enormous flows of temporary migrants to places that have high per capita incomes, but are not normally considered part of the “developed” world: Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, for instance, make up a large portion of the labor force in the wealthy Gulf states. There are also very large flows of people from one poor country to another: almost half of all emigrants from poor countries today reside in other poor countries.^[130] In some ways, this is an expanded version of a phenomenon with late nineteenth-century roots: during that period, tens of millions of Chinese and Indian migrants, who were largely excluded from richer coun­tries, went to poor areas of Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Some were merchants, but far more went to labor in mines or on plantations.

Migration patterns are so complex that predictions are extremely difficult to make. Flows and stocks of migrants are determined by the interaction of factors such as the differential growth of populations, divergences in stan­dards of living, regulations and laws that influence migratory flows and their composition, proximity, and distance - in other words, demographic, economic, political, and geographic factors. Demographic pressures will continue: between 2010 and 2030, the population aged twenty to sixty is projected to increase 26 percent in the poor countries, and decline 7 percent in the rich ones; in Sub-Saharan Africa the increase will exceed 60 percent, while in large countries such as Russia, Japan, Germany, or Italy there will be a decline of 30 percent or more. On the other hand, economic inequal­ities between the rich and the poor world have widened: between 1950 and 2000 the gap in per capita real income between the Western economies (Europe and North America) and Asia, Africa, and Central and South America was US$5,000-6,000, but in the year 2000 the gap had widened to US$i4,000-i9,000.^[131]

How the deepening of globalization, and persisting demographic and economic inequalities, will interact with migration policies, which in the last decades have become more restrictive and selective, is impossible to say. That adds further uncertainties to those presented by mortality and fertility. World population growth may, indeed, decelerate until a state of semi- stationary equilibrium is reached, as the consensus of demographers expects. But chances are those who anticipate uniform demographic behavior around the world, and expect all populations to converge upon a single demographic regime, will be surprised by the future. Inconsistencies and inequalities among nations, within nations, among regions and within regions, are likely to persist, even if not so pronounced in fifty years as today. Ecological, economic, political, and cultural conditions will vary, and in so far as demography represents human reactions to these variables, it will vary too. So while demography contains a good bit of inertia, and is easier to predict accurately than most other aspects of human existence, it in the end contains its share of uncertainties.

Further reading

Ahluwalia, Sanjam. Reproductive Restraints: Birth Control in India, 1877-1947. Champaign, n: University of IUinois Press, 2007.

Bardet, Jean-Pierre, and Jacques DupSquier, eds. Histoire des populations de !.’Europe, 4 vols. Paris: Fayard, 1997-1999.

Bashford, Alison. Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

Chesnais, Jean-Claude. The Demographic Transition: Stages, Patterns, and Economic Implications: A Longitudinal Study of Sixty-Seven Countries Covering the Period 1720-1984. Oxford University Press, 1993.

Cipolla, C. M. The Economic History of World Population. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962.

Coale, Ansley J., and Susan Watkins, eds. The Decline of Fertility in Europe. Princeton University Press, 1986.

Cohen, Joel. How Many People Can the Earth Support? New York: Norton, 1999.

Connelly, Matthew. Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Davis, Kingsley. The Population of India and Pakistan. 1951; New York: Russell & Russell, 1968.

Demeny, Paul, and Geoffrey McNicoll. The Political Economy of Global Population Change, 1950-2050. New York: Population Council, 2006.

Derosas, Renzo, and Frans van Poppel, eds. Religion and the Decline of Fertility in the Western World. Dordrecht: Springer, 2005.

Fogel, Robert. The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America, and the Third World. Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Gillis, John R., Louise A. Tilly, and David Levine, eds. The European Experience of Declining Fertility, 1850-1970: The Quiet Revolution. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

Gooszen, A. J. A Demographic History of the Indonesian Archipelago, 1880-1942. Leiden: KITLV, 1999.

Greenhalgh, Susan. Cultivating Global Citizens: Population in the Rise of China. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Guilmoto, Christophe, and S. I. Rajan, eds. Fertility Transition in South India. London: Sage, 2005.

Hayami, Akira. The Historical Demography of Pre-modern Japan. University of Tokyo Press, 2001.

Hoerder, Dirk. Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium. Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2002.

Klein, Herbert S. A Population History of the United States. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Lee, James Z., and Wang Feng. One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities, 1700-2000. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Liu, Ts'ui-jung, James Lee, David Sven Reher, et al., eds. Asian Population History. Oxford University Press, 2001.

Livi-Bacci, Massimo. A Concise History of World Population. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

A Short History of Migration. Cambridge: Polity, 2012.

The Population of Europe. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.

Lutz, Wolfgang, Sergei Scherbov, and A. G. Volkov, eds. Demographic Trends and Patterns in the Soviet Union before 1991. London: Routledge, 1994.

McEvedy, Colin, and Richard Jones. Atlas of World Population History. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.

Maddison, Angus. The World Economy: Historical Statistics. Paris: OECD, 2003.

Manning, Patrick. Migration in World History. London: Routledge, 2012.

O Grada, Cormac. Famine: A Short History. Princeton University Press, 2009.

Riley, James C. Rising Life Expectancy: A Global History. Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Saito, Osamu. “Infanticide, fertility and ‘population stagnation': the state of Tokugawa historical demography.” Japan Forum 4:2 (1992), 369-381.

Sanchez Albornoz, Nicolas. The Population of Latin America: A History. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1974.

Scharping, Thomas. Birth Control in China, 1949-2000: Population Policy and Demographic Development. London: Routledge, 2002.

United Nations Population Division. World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision, New York, 2011.

World Population Prospects: The 2012 Revision, New York, 2013.

World Population to 2300. New York: United Nations, 2004.

Wrigley, E. A., and R. S. Schofield. The Population History of England, 1541-1871. Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Zuberi, Tukufu, et al., eds. The Demography of South Africa. Armonk, ny: M. E. Sharpe, 2005.