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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
Few would contest the general proposition that the population factor bears directly on the course of the friendly — and sometimes unfriendly — competition between states in the world arena today. Problems arise, however, when we try to move from the general to the specific. How, exactly, do human numbers (population size, composition, and trends of change) affect the ability of governments to influence events beyond their borders — or affect the disposition of a country's interactions with outside actors? And this is no less important for the would-be strategist: How can we use population indicators to anticipate, with some reasonable hope of accuracy, the impact of yet-unfolding demographic forces on the balance of international power? This essay explores these questions for the world's largest strategic arena: the great Asian/Eurasian expanse.
1 See United Nations Population Division, World Population Prospects: The 2002 Revision Population Database, from which most of the data used in this essay are taken.
2 Christophe Z. Guilmoto and S. Irudaya Rajan, “District Level Estimates of Fertility for India's 2001 Census,” Economic and Political Weekly (February 16, 2002).
3 Iran's latest Demographic and Health Survey placed the country's TFR at 2.17 in 2000. (Mohammad Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi, “Recent Changes and the Future of Fertility in Iran,” paper prepared for UNPD Expert Group Meeting on Completing the Fertility Transition, New York, March 11-14, 2002.) Vietnam's 2002 Demographic and Health Survey indicated that the country's TFR had dropped to 1.9. (“Vietnam Demographic and Health Survey 2002, “Hanoi: National Committee for Population, Family, and Children, September 2003.)
4 The “old” literature on the social, economic, and political consequences of rapid population growth in low-income areas often betrayed a hardened Malthusian cast of mind. To cite one such study to exemplify the many: National Academy of Sciences, Office of the Foreign Secretary, Rapid Population Growth: Consequences and Policy Implications (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971).
In retrospect, it is apparent that such thinking was highly alert to the possible stresses and problems presented by the demographic boom but exceedingly inattentive to the potential benefits and opportunities it might confer (not the least of these emanating from the health revolution that prompted these population explosions in the first place).
A new literature on the economic implications of population change in Asia is now beginning to emerge, one characterized by a more optimistic assessment of the influence of the region's demographic trends on prospects for material development. To exemplify the many with a single study once again: David Bloom, David Canning, and Jaypee Sevilla, The Demographic Dividend: A New Perspective on the Economic Consequences of Population Change (RAND, 2002). Unfortunately, it is not yet clear that this new tendency, though different in flavor, is free of the stifling idées fixes so characteristic of the literature it means to replace.
Newly fashionable arguments about the glowing possibilities of “demographic dividends” apparent in East Asian — or future South and Southeast Asian — trends in domestic “dependency ratios” (the proportion of older and younger citizens in relation to persons “of working age”) would seem, on their very face, to exaggerate the contribution of crude demographic structure to actual economic performance. The new “dividendism,” for example, proposes to credit much or even most of East Asia's dazzling growth record over the past several decades to its purportedly felicitous “dependency ratios” during the years in question — but neglects to explain why economic performance over that same period should have been so very disappointing for the countries of the Caribbean, even though the two areas exhibited quite similar levels and trends in the evolution of their “dependency ratios” from the mid-1960s to the present.
5 In 1975, of course, the Russian republic was embedded in the larger construct of the Soviet Union. Correspondingly, comparing population totals for Russia and Pakistan for that particular year is an exercise fraught with implicitly ahistorical assumptions. Nevertheless, these projections suggest that Russia's population total, which slightly exceeded Pakistan's as recently as 2000, will come to be only half as great as Pakistan's in just a quarter-century.
6 These projections are taken from the U.S. Census Bureau's International Database. The UNPD does not recognize the sovereignty of the Republic of China and does not offer estimates or projections for it.
7 Deborah Roseveare, Willi Liebfritz, Douglas Fore, and Eckhard Wurzel, “Ageing Populations, Pension Systems and Government Budgets: Simulations for 20 OECD Countries,” OECD Economics Working Papers No. 168 (1996).
8 OECD, OECD Country Survey: Japan 2002, Supplement 2 (Paris: oecd, 2002), 42, 52. Japan now has the highest ratio of public debt to GDP of any OECD country.
9 See, for example, Robert Stowe England, The Macroeconomic Impact of Global Aging: A New Era of Economic Frailty? (Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2002); and Paul S. Hewitt, “The Grey Roots of Japan's Crisis,” in The Demographic Dilemma: Japan's Aging Society, (Smithsonian Institution, Woodrow Wilson Center, Asia Special Report 107, January 2003), 4-9.
10 According to estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau's International Programs Center, in fact, this limited social security network has managed to generate unfunded liabilities with a net present value equal to 125 percent to 150 percent of China's current GDP! (Personal communication, Dr. Loraine A. West, U.S. Census Bureau, May 2003.)
11 Results taken from the reves database, available at http://euroreves.ined.fr/reves.
12 By accepted convention, HIV prevalence refers to the prevalence rate among the adult population 15-49 years of age — an arbitrary but not entirely unreasonable metric.
13 This latter point comes from Daniel M. Goodkind, “Recent Trends in the Sex Ratio at Birth in East Asia,” U.S. Census Bureau International Programs Center, unpublished paper (June 2002).
14 Ansley J. Coale and Judith Banister, “Five Decades of Missing Females in China,” Demography (July 1994).
15 The classic exposition here is J. Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective,” in D.V. Glass and D.E.C. Eversley, eds., Population in History (Aldine Publishing Company, 1965).
16 Valerie Hudson and Andrea Den Boer, “A Surplus of Men, A Deficit of Peace: Security and Sex Ratios in Asia's Largest States,” International Security (Spring 2002).
17 Edward N. Luttwak, “Where Are the Great Powers? Home With the Kids,” Foreign Affairs (July-August 1994).
18 See Fred Arnold, Sunita Kishor, and T.K. Roy, “Sex-Selective Abortions in India,” Population and Development Review (December 2002).
19 Part of these local, biologically impossible disparities could perhaps be attributed to differential migration or mortality patterns, but the numerical imbalance between boys and girls is too substantial to be explained away altogether.
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