Chapter Seven: Things to Come: Demographic Possibilities, 2025

Completing the Transition

Age structures in which the demographically dominant groups are older than 30 lend themselves to government efforts to build and maintain political stability and legitimacy. Countries with transitional and mature population age structures as a group have historically been politically stable, democratic and wealthy. Likewise, very young age structures pose serious challenges that tend to undermine political and economic development. Responding to these challenges requires an effective national government with strong institutions and well-allocated resources, often in partnership with other countries and organizations.

Research demonstrates that women who have completed most or all of secondary school have lower fertility rates, and that large family sizes that keep women out of the work force are incompatible with sustained economic growth. However, policymakers have been slow to act on the connections between women's lives, population dynamics and broader development. This policy lapse has stunted the development of many countries and regions that remain stalled in the early stages of the demographic transition.

The education of children and employment of young adults are the foundation of a country's development. A country may be less vulnerable to political instability when young men perceive that the government is working to improve their employment opportunities and to overcome economic barriers to starting a family. Governments are better able to meet those expectations when demographic conditions such as balanced age structure support a focus on the young.

To achieve a world of more favorable and balanced age structures by 2025, a series of steps related to population change are needed:

• Governments, local organizations and international partners should make voluntary access to modern contraception and sexual health information as widespread as possible, for all who seek it, including youth.
• Policies should also work to increase girls' educational attainment and make it easier for women to enter and compete in the work force–while strengthening education generally. Gender issues should be mainstreamed into all development and social welfare policies.
• Legal regulations must also afford women equal rights to custody of their own children, to divorce, to access to reproductive health services, to inheritance and land title, to security from gender-based violence, and to protection in schools and in the workplace. Such issues should be removed from the purview of religious courts or customary law.
• National education programs should be targeted at reducing cultural discrimination of women; reducing families' preference for sons, which can lead to sex-selective abortion and neglect of female children; campaigning against sexual violence; and ending exclusive male control over decisions regarding sex and fertility.
• Policies and programs should be tailored to countries' specific population dynamics in order to sustain and expand the opportunities that progress along the demographic transition has already created in many countries, and encourage their expansion to the rest of the developing world. For example, industrial countries with aging populations should not let old-age pension and health care costs take resources away from investments in youth.

The fears of runaway population growth that were widespread in the 1960s and 1970s have eased as family size has declined worldwide and population growth rates have fallen. In some regions, the fear is now that fertility decline is going "too far," threatening stability and economic security in countries with aging and declining populations. As world population adds 76 million people per year, however, the evidence of recent demographic transition supports a different conclusion: Countries tend to be less vulnerable to civil conflict, more able to resolve their economic and political problems, and better poised to face future changes and challenges when adults 30 and older outnumber those who are younger than 30 in the population.

Demographic transition has not gone too far; in fact it is not yet complete in most of the world's countries. Access to family planning and reproductive health services for all who seek them–in concert with improvements in the lives of women–contribute to more balanced age structures. Evidence suggests that these healthier, mature age structures, in turn, support secure, stable and prosperous societies. Although most governments have fallen short of their financial commitments to make family planning and reproductive health available to all, that objective remains crucial to beneficially shaping not only the population age structure, but all that the future sends our way.