For decades, the American media have warned of the catastrophic consequences of world population explosion. Strangely, the media have continued their warnings even as global fertility rates have plummeted. However, while the media irrationally fixate on an imaginary population explosion, serious scholars are beginning to examine the consequences of real-world population decline. In a recent issue of Futures, for instance, economist Sanghan Yea of Kyung Hee University in South Korea ponders the demographic trends implicit in new data from the United Nations and from the U.S. Census Bureau. What he sees in these trends is deeply sobering.
"By 2050," Yea notes, "people aged 60 and over are expected to outnumber those under 15 for the first time in known history." But what concerns Yea even more than the aging of the world's population is its anticipated shrinkage, with plausible statistical models already predicting that if current trends were to hold, "between 2040 and 2050, the world's population would fall by about 85 million ... and would [then] shrink by roughly 25% with each successive generation." Yea underscores U.S. Census analyses predicting that the population of some industrialized countries-including Germany, France, Italy, and Japan-will "reach its highest point around 2020 and fall thereafter." "We are going to face," Yea predicts, "not only aging, but also imploding (as opposed to exploding) world population."
The likely economic consequences of global population contraction particularly worry Yea, who discerns "a clear positive relationship between economic prosperity and number of people," with global population growth playing "an important role in bringing economic prosperity to human beings." Seen from this perspective, a growing world population has "helped the great advancements in science and technology materialize into wealth." Consequently, as the global population shrinks, it appears to Yea that "the world economy is going to get worse." Because a shrinking world population means "sharply winnowed and less competitive work forces," "surfeits of retirees," and overall "efficiency decline," Yea anticipates a "chain reaction" entailing a series of shocks from which "the economy would never recover."
Using economic data collected from North Korea and Russia-two countries that have already experienced population contraction in recent years-Yea argues that population decline has a "more damaging impact on the economy than we expect presently." "Depopulation," Yea writes, "not only stops economic growth completely, but also reverses it." Indeed, Yea predicts a potentially "disastrous situation," an economic "crash" in which "the world economy will contract faster than [the world population] does and [will] never reach the previous levels attained with the earlier smaller populations."
Perhaps, Yea suggests in his conclusion, "all countries should try to maintain their birth rates above the replacement level" by developing "a society in which babies are welcomed, not destroyed" and in which "children are regarded as a blessing, not an inconvenience; and motherhood is treasured as an honorable vocation."
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