GLOBAL DEMOGRAPHY

• Before the start of the demographic transition: life was short, births were many, growth was slow and the population was young.
• Famine mortality was reduced by improvements in storage and transportation. Secular increases in incomes led to improved nutrition in childhood and throughout life.
• Another major factor in the early phases of growing life expectancy is improvement in nutrition. The continuing reduction in mortality is due to reductions in chronic and degenerative diseases, improved personal hygiene and preventive medicine.
• The global demographic transition has brought momentous changes: reshaping the economic and demographic life cycles of individuals and restructuring populations.
• The Chinese economic hub currently has 24.2 million of population. Authorities just put a plan in place to cap the permanent population at 25 million.
• China similarly hopes to cap the permanent population of Beijing at 23 million and Shanghai at 24.2 million.
• Aresearch fellow at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences predicts that the poor will bear the brunt of the new population limit the most because the government will begin tearing down cheap housing now in existence, per the Global Times.
• Nearly 60% of residents in Shanghai expressed a preference for having only 1 child. Shanghai saw its population fall in 2022
• The State Council, which refers to all of the above as "big city disease" the maladies common to major cities are: environmental pollution, gridlock traffic, and a decline in the quality of public services such as medical care and education, also will limit the amount of land made available for development in the coming years.
• The transition began in 1800 with declining mortality in Europe, and it has now spread to all parts of the world and is projected to be completed by 2100.
• The 3 centuries of demographic transition from 1800 to 2100 will reshape the world's population in a number of ways. The obvious changes are the rise in total population from 1 billion in 1800 to perhaps 9.5 billion in 2100
• Big Three of Demography

  1. Birth
  2. Death
  3. Migration
• During the demographic transition, First mortality and then fertility declined, causing population growth rates first to accelerate and then to slow again, moving toward low fertility, long life, and an old population.
• There will then be 50 times as many elders, but only 5 times as many children; thus, the ratio of elders to children will have risen by a factor of 10. The length of life, which has already more than doubled, will have tripled, while births per woman will have dropped from 6 to 2.
• According to Fogel and Barker, Secular increases in incomes led to improved nutrition in childhood and throughout life. Life expectancy is positively associated with height in the industrial country populations
• In recent decades, the continuing reduction in mortality is due to reductions in chronic and degenerative diseases, notably heart disease and cancer (Riley, 2001).
• Some of the improvement in child survival is itself a response to parental decisions to invest more in the health and welfare of a smaller number of children (Nerlove, 1974).
• Furthermore, parents with higher incomes choose to devote more resources to each child, and since this raises the cost of each child, it also leads to fewer children (Becker, 1981; Willis, 1974, 1994)
• Today, the median individual lives in a country with a total fertility rate of 2.3 barely above the 2.1 fertility rate of the United States—and a median life expectancy at birth of 68 years compared to 77 years for the United States (Wilson, 2001)
• The combination of fertility and mortality determines population growth
• Consequences of Demographic Transition

  • Parents reduces their fertility
  • Many other changes will also be set in motion in family structure, health, institutions for saving and supporting retirement and even in international flows of people and capital.
  • Women will be more concentrated with childbearing
  • Number of children born declines sharply
  • Negative population growth rates in developed countries
  • Reshapes the world’s population