Demographics has played an important role in the Arab rebellions, said Joseph Chamie of the Center for Migration Studies during a recent panel discussion at the annual Population Association of America (PAA) meeting in San Francisco. But demographics can exacerbate other serious problems, including brutal repression, human rights violations, government corruption, poverty, unemployment, religious and tribal rivalries, and a large influx of migrants and refugees. The largest refugee population in the world is in the Arab region, he said. The panel’s speakers were John Casterline, Ohio State University; Richard Cincotta, the Stimson Center; Farzaneh “Nazy” Roudi, Population Reference Bureau; and Nasra Shah, Kuwait University.
In his presentation, “Potential Upheaval in the Arab Region—Impact on Reproductive Change?”, John Casterline focused on the consequences of the rebellions, while the following speakers outlined more of the determinants. Casterline illustrated his presentation with anecdotes from his visits to the region and conversations with people, concluding that while it’s still early, “a period of dashed hope seems to be settling in.” The rebellions seem to have brought a pronatalist movement into effect, with the rejections of a “Western agenda.” Demographic data and demographic analysis have lost legitimacy since the old regime, he said. The return of electoral politics has established a direct relationship between population and political weight. Still, he added, couples ultimately make their own decisions about their households.
A young Egyptian protester holding an Egyptian flag, Cairo, Egypt. Photo: Kim Eun Yeul / World Bank
Richard Cincotta discussed “Politicodemographic Forecasts of the Rite of Democracy in North Africa.” He presented a demographic model of the region and said that in his view, the era of democratization (in its third wave) is not over, yet.
Nazy Roudi, director of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Program at PRB, presented, “Numbers Don’t Lie: Youth in Egypt.” One in four Arabs is an Egyptian, she said, and unemployment among youth in the MENA region is the highest in the world—2.5 times higher than in East Asia and South Asia. And unemployment among women is far higher than among men. She cited the Survey of Youth in Egypt 2009 in which women said the reason they did not find a job was because they believed there was no job available for the qualifications they had. Meanwhile, men responded that they were unable to find a job because they did not think that an available job paid enough. Roudi echoed Casterline’s earlier point that while government policies are important, more important is the balance of gender roles within a family, and that women feel empowered to talk with their husbands about fertility decisions. “My prediction is that the TFR is going to become higher in Egypt,” Roudi said.
by Jay Gribble, vice president, International Programs
As the National Leaders Conference on Family Planning, Population, and Development opens with all protocols observed, it’s quite inspiring to hear the comments of leaders who have made opening remarks. Lilly Banda of USAID/Malawi’s Health team spoke of the importance of addressing unmet need for family planning—making modern family planning information and services available to women who want to avoid pregnancy—as a key strategy to achieving Malawi’s development goals, including the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The high level of unmet need undermines achieving the MDGs. At the same time, slowing Malawi’s population growth and achieving sustainable levels of fertility will contribute to a higher quality of life for the people of Malawi. As such, family planning is an indispensable development issue, contributing to health and the economic development of Malawi. There is a role for all stakeholders in the process, for together—the public and private sectors, traditional and public officials, government and civil society—all have a vital role to play.
As USAID Mission Director Doug Arbuckle pointed out, this is the first-ever conference in Malawi for population and development, signaling that the Government of Malawi is identifying these issues as a priority for the development and well-being of the nation. Population growth remains a tremendous development challenge: In the 2008 census, Malawi’s population was 13 million; it is currently close to 15 million. With such rapid population growth, addressing the issue is not just a matter of good development policy, it is a matter of life and death. So critical is the importance of addressing Malawi’s population growth, that the challenge of population growth can doom all other development policies.
HIV/AIDS in Cameroon. The preliminary report of the 2011 Cameroon Demographic and Health Survey/HIV (DHS/HIV) has been released (in French). This survey tested 13,503 women and men ages 15-49 and 699 men ages 50-59 for HIV infection. The results indicate that 4.3 percent of the 15-49 age group were HIV positive, 5.6 percent among females and 2.9 percent among males. The males ages 50-59 were 2.9 percent positive. The 2011 prevalence was lower than that reported in the 2004 Cameroon DHS, which was 5.5 percent for 15-49 year-olds, 6.8 percent among females and 4.1 percent among males.
Youth Tax in Germany. Germany is likely to impose a 1 percent additional income tax on workers over the age of 25 as a “demographic reserve” to prepare for the time when German baby boomers of the 1950s and 1960s will swell the ranks of pensioners. Official projections show that there will be 7 million fewer workers by 2025 to support retirees. Germany’s total fertility rate fell below the replacement level over 40 years ago and is currently about 1.35 children per woman.
Latest Data on the Sex Ratio at Birth (SRB) in India. Following up on an earlier blog post on this subject, progress on this measure has clearly stalled for a number of years. The national campaign against the abortion of female fetuses may be in for a difficult stretch. The graphs below update the Sample Registration System data to the period 2008-2010. Since there about 5 percent more male births than female births worldwide, a normal sex ratio at birth in India would be 950 female births per 1,000 male births. India’s SRB is the reverse of most other countries which typically show male births per 100 female births. Note particularly the two states with the lowest SRB, Punjab and Haryana. Improvement in their SRBs stopped three or four years ago. A somewhat similar trend can be seen in the five states in the second graph although their ratios are better. The national SRB in India is 905, 898 in urban areas and 907 in rural. More data from the new report will be in the next blog post.
Obviously, at PRB we care about censuses. Much of the analysis and communication we do rely on census data. They provide invaluable data on the size, composition, and other factors of a population, from the national level down to the smallest village. This in turn can lead to more effective social policies. With census data, funding can target the programs and areas that need it most, leading to healthier and more-educated people. But in many countries, lack of finances or infrastructure, war, or large amounts of remote populations can make getting accurate data or even conducting a census in the first place a major challenge.
UNFPA has just produced a fascinating new documentary on how censuses are conducted in five countries facing very difficult environments. From watching the film, you get a sense of just how complicated an undertaking a census is, but also how much can be achieved, given political will and support. But at the end of the day, conducting a census and gathering data isn’t just about abstract data and numbers; it’s about people and the challenges they face — learning more about their lives in order to improve their lives. As a UNFPA employee mentions in the documentary, there are some countries that haven’t conducted a census since the 1980s. This lack of data and evidence can lead to ineffective or nonexistent policies, hindering national development.
In Chad, it has meant mapping vast, sparsely populated regions in the midst of political upheaval.
In the Occupied Palestinian Territory, it involved overcoming barriers that restricted mobility.
In Bolivia, or the Plurinational State of Bolivia as it is now so aptly named, conducting the census required fine-tuning questions and translating them into multiple languages to meet the needs of dozens of ethnic groups.
In Indonesia, the census tracks extremely rapid growth and urbanization.
In Belarus, it counts the nation’s dwindling population.
On a related note, former PRB president William Butz interviewed Terry Hull, professor of Demography in the Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute, about the 2010 Indonesian census, the challenges of working in a multiethnic and geographically varied landscape, and the successes of using technology to reach more people:
The Mozambique 2011 Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) is the third DHS in a series that began in 1997. The preliminary report has just been released. A major finding of the survey is that there has been no perceived decline in the total fertility rate (TFR) since the first DHS, and that the TFR may actually have risen. The survey interviewed 13,745 women ages 15 to 49 and 4,035 men ages 15 to 59 from May to November 2011. The TFR obtained in the survey was 5.9 for the three-year period preceding the survey. For urban women, the TFR was 4.5 and, for rural women, who were 65.3 percent of the sample, 6.6. The reported TFR in the 2011 DHS was higher than that obtained in both the 1997 and 2003 DHS (see figure). The 2011 DHS TFR can also be compared with a TFR of 6.1 obtained in the 2008 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) conducted by UNICEF. In the survey, 46 percent of women with five living children said that did not wish to have any additional children and 59.4 percent of those with six or more children also said that they wished to cease childbearing. Of those two groups, the percentage who declared themselves to be sterile or who had been sterilized was 7.6 and 7.2, respectively. It would seem that the desire for small families is largely absent in Mozambique.
Click on image for full version.
In the survey, 11.6 percent of currently married women or in union women said that they were using some form of family planning, with 11.1 percent using a modern method. Injection topped the list of modern methods at 5.1 percent, followed by 4.5 percent using the contraceptive pill, and 1.1 percent the male condom. Contraceptive use by method was very similar to that in the 2003 DHS, which was 16.5 percent for all methods and 11.7 percent for modern methods . These are methods commonly used for spacing births, not limiting their number, something frequently observed in sub-Saharan Africa.
The decline in infant and child mortality, as reported in surveys, has been rather dramatic. The infant mortality rate (IMR) in the five years before the 2011 DHS was 64 infant deaths below age 1 per 1,000 live births, down from 79 in the five to nine years before the survey and 106 in the 10 to 14 years before the survey. In the 2008 MICS, the IMR for the five years before the survey was 95, suggesting that it could possibly be higher than the 2011 DHS indicates. But decline in the IMR seems quite evident. The decline in the child death rate, ages 1 to 4, was slightly slower than for infant mortality, to 35 deaths per 1,000 five years before the survey from 46 five to nine years before the survey and 59 10 to 14 years before.
The very low Total Fertility Rates (TFRs, the average number of children a woman would bear in her lifetime if the birth rate of a particular year were to remain constant) in two developed countries compared with the United States illustrate just how widely childbearing patterns vary. In Japan and South Korea, childbearing below age 20 is nearly nonexistent. In the United States, however, the age-specific fertility rate is 35 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 19, the highest in developed countries and rivaled only by the United Kingdom. However, the U.S. teen birth rate has declined since the late 1990s when it was 50. The TFR in the three countries are 1.4 (Japan in 2010), 1.2 (Korea in 2011), and 1.9 (the U.S. in 2010). In the 20-to-24 age group, the increase in Japan is rather modest and very small in South Korea. After that, the patterns are roughly the same. Quite obviously, younger women in those two countries are avoiding childbearing in large numbers and, when they do begin having children, never come close to the two-child “replacement” level. Childbearing is not simply delayed but often shunned.
An attention-getting headline in the major Indian daily newspaper, The Hindu recentlyobserved: “Half of India’s homes have mobile phones, but not toilets.” Such contradictions portray a country with some of the trappings of modernity combined with living conditions in India’s 247 million households that look more medieval. The Registrar General of India has released statistics on the level of living in India from the 2011 Census and the results are quite revealing. Even more revealing are the changes since the 2001 Census.
Regarding the first two issues in the headline, the percentage of houses with an indoor toilet is still less than half but there was an improvement (see table below). But, if one sees the glass as half empty, should the percentage increase in toilets remain steady, the 2071 Census would be the first to show this figure to reach 100 percent! Conditions in rural areas are much worse than urban areas given that 7 out of 10 households must resort to open places like fields, bush, river, stream, railway tracks, and so forth.
And how about those mobile phones? More than half of households do have at least one, nearly half in rural areas and 76 percent in urban areas. Many households, of course, possess more than one mobile. Perhaps that is not so surprising since a very basic mobile phone costs as little as US$40 and can be relatively quickly purchased; not so for a sewer hookup. That US$40 cost is, nonetheless, quite substantial for many households. Reports indicate that there are now over 700 million mobile phones in India.
Percentage of Households With Amenities in India, 2001 and 2011
Sources: 2001 and 2011 India Censuses.
While about 92 million (37 percent of all households) and 78 million (32 percent) households live in one- and two-room houses, respectively, there are also about 10 million households that do not have any exclusive room for living as the room in which they live is also used as a shop or office. Using only the number of rooms as an indicator of “middle class,” how many households might be considered to be in that group? If we set that at four rooms, then 13 percent of households would be in that category. The construction of many of the houses in which those households live may be a bit startling. The walls of one-third of houses consist of grass, thatch, bamboo, plastic sheet, mud, or wood. Most of the remaining two-thirds have walls of brick, stone, or concrete with brick accounting for nearly half of all houses. Mud is used for the floor in 47 percent of houses; concrete accounts for 31 percent.
While India is widely touted as an emerging economic power, nearly half of the country still cooks with firewood, two-thirds among the vast rural population and those proportions have barely changed during the last decade. It is quite heartening to note that use of Liquefied Petroleum Gas/Piped Natural Gas (LPG/PNG) comes next and the percentage of households using LPG/PNG has increased from 17.5 percent in 2001 to 28.5 percent in 2011.
News from Uganda. Press reports quote the Bureau of Statistics of Uganda (UBOS) with leaked data from the not-yet-released 2011 Demographic and Health Survey. The country’s total fertility rate (TFR) reportedly declined to 6.2 from 6.7 in the 2006 DHS, still very high but a drop nonetheless. The infant mortality rate also declined from 76 deaths to infants below age 1 per 1,000 live births to 54, a notable drop in a short time. In addition, the results of the 2011 AIDS Indicator Survey (AIS) shows that 6.7 percent of adults ages 15 to 49 were infected with HIV, an increase from 6.4 percent in the 2004- 2005 AIS.
Fewer babies in the Czech Republic. A March 2012 survey in the Czech Republic found that 85 percent of Czechs think the country’s low birth rate is a serious problem. The Czech TFR has declined to 1.42 in 2011 from 1.49 in 2010. In the survey, 29 percent said that financial difficulties among young couples were the primary cause; 24 percent blamed insufficient state support; and 16 percent cited “careerism.”
Urban USA. The U.S. population surpassed 80 percent urban in the 2010 Census (80.7 percent), up from 79 percent in 2000. The Census Bureau identifies two types of urban areas: “urbanized areas” of 50,000 or more people and “urban clusters” of at least 2,500 and less than 50,000 people. There are 486 urbanized areas and 3,087 urban clusters nationwide. The Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim urbanized area is the most densely population with 7,000 people per sq. mile. The New York-Newark, NJ was only the fifth most densely populated at 5,316 per sq. mile. But New York easily maintains the top spot in population with 18,391,295 residents to the 12,150,996 in second-place Los Angeles. The smallest urban area is Lake Rancho Viejo, California, barely making the cutoff at 2.500 inhabitants.
The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) has reported that the preliminary number of births in the United States fell to 3,978,000 during the 12-month period from July 2010 to June 2011. The last time births were below 4 million a year was in 1999. So the decline in births, believed by many to be a result of the Great Recession, has continued. The crude birth rate (CBR) fell to 12.8 births per 1,000 population, down from a recent high of 14.3 in 2007 before the recession is said to have begun. But, as NCHS notes, the rate of decline has slowed. That may suggest that this relatively minor baby “bust” may be bottoming out.
A variety of measures of fertility is given in the table below. The third column, births per 1,000 women ages 15-44, called the general fertility rate (GFR,) is a somewhat better measure of fertility since it restricts the denominator of the rate to women in their childbearing ages. As such, it is not influenced by the population above and below those ages, as is the CBR.
Source: National Center for Health Statistics. 2010 and 2011 figures are preliminary. July 2010 - June 2011 total fertility rate is a PRB estimate.
Natural decrease improves in Russia. Russia continued its recovery in 2011 from its dramatic natural decrease (births minus deaths) of past years, but not from a rising birth rate. Natural decrease in 2011, just reported by the national statistics office GOSKOMSTAT, fell further to -131,208 in 2011 from -241,340 in 2010. It had reached an eye-popping low point of -958,532 in 2000. But births in 2011 were basically the same as in 2010, 1,793,828 vs. 1,789,623. It was the decline in deaths from 2,030,963 in 2010 to 1,925,036 in 2011 that resulted in a rosier natural decrease. Interesting development.
That’s a lot of marriages in one day. The day one gets married in India depends upon astrology. Marriages are heavily concentrated during a propitious day or days. But I recently learned that back on Nov. 28, 2011, there were 60,000 marriages in Delhi (The Indian Express, Nov. 27, 2011). I have been there when there were about 18,000, but 60,000 is truly phenomenal. Hindu and Sikh wedding ceremonies take place over a period of days and are lavish affairs requiring a tent venue for the groom to prepare and some type of wedding hall. That’s in addition to white horses, brass bands, and fireworks for the baarat when the groom processes to the wedding venue with his family. Wish I’d been there!
And, yes, a bit more about Taiwan. Taiwan, which recorded the lowest total fertility rate (TFR — the average number of children would bear in her lifetime if the birth rate of a particular year were to remain constant) in recent world history, if not in all history, at 0.9 children per woman during 2010, the unlucky year of the Tiger. In 2011, the Rabbit year, births jumped to 196,627 from 166,886 in 2010. While the Rabbit year is not particularly auspicious, it seems some couples waited until the Tiger Year had ended to have a child. The Dragon year began on January 23, 2012 and is a very auspicious year. That will be followed by the Snake year, which is not particularly auspicious for births. So, are we are likely to see a bit of a “baby boom,” but only for a while? The Taiwanese government is very worried about the population aging consequences of such a low birth rate.
Census news. Canada has reported the early results of its May 10, 2011 census: 33,476,688. Population growth was larger from the 2006 to 2011 censuses in western provinces and territories, such as Yukon (11.7 percent) and Alberta (10.8 percent). Nova Scotia has the slowest growth, an increase of only 0.9 percent in the period. Nationally, the country’s census counts increased by 5.9 percent between the censuses, the highest rate among the G8 countries. According to Statistics Canada, the count was about 1 million less than the population previously estimated for July 1, 2011. Following studies of both undercount and overcount, Statistics Canada suggests the higher precensal estimate continue to be used Canada will then base new population estimates on the results. In 2001, the net undercount was 2.99 percent and, in 2006, it was 2.67 percent. The improvement in 2006 was due to an increase in overcounting which more than offset the increase in undercounting. The 2011 undercount study is scheduled for release in March 2013.
