Armenia: demographic challenges

Shavarsh Kocharya

Demographic Dividend or Demographic Threat in Pakistan

Population growth and size have remained the focus of debate for centuries but the recent demographic transition in developing countries has made social scientists take note of the changing age structure of the population as well. As a result of declining population growth and consequent changes in age structure, the proportion of working-age population is increasing in most developing countries, with an associated decline in the dependent age population, offering a window of opportunity to these countries that is referred to as the demographic dividend. Pakistan is also going through the demographic transition, and is experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime demographic dividend as the working-age population bulges and the dependency ratio declines. This paper looks into the demographic dividend available to Pakistan and its implications for the country, mainly through three mechanisms : labour supply, savings, and human capital. For economic benefits to materialise, there is a need for policies dealing with education, public health, and those that promote labour market flexibility and provide incentives for investment and savings. On the contrary, if appropriate policies are not formulated, the demographic dividend might in fact be a cost, leading to unemployment and an unbearable strain on education, health, and old age security.Demographic dividend, age-structure, demographic transition, Pakistan

Demographic Dividend or Demographic Threat in Pakistan

Population growth and size have remained the focus of debate for centuries but the recent demographic transition in developing countries has made social scientists take note of the changing age structure of the population as well. As a result of declining population growth and consequent changes in age structure, the proportion of working-age population is increasing in most developing countries, with an associated decline in the dependent age population, offering a window of opportunity to these countries that is referred to as the “demographic dividend”. Pakistan is also going through the demographic transition, and is experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime demographic dividend as the working-age population bulges and the dependency ratio declines. This paper looks into the demographic dividend available to Pakistan and its implications for the country, mainly through three mechanisms: labour supply, savings, and human capital. For economic benefits to materialise, there is a need for policies dealing with education, public health, and those that promote labour market flexibility and provide incentives for investment and savings. On the contrary, if appropriate policies are not formulated, the demographic dividend might in fact be a cost, leading to unemployment and an unbearable strain on education, health, and old age securityDemographic dividend, age-structure, demographic transition, Pakistan

Forcing anomalous scaling on demographic fluctuations

We discuss the conditions under which a population of anomalously diffusing individuals can be characterized by demographic fluctuations that are anomalously scaling themselves. Two examples are provided in the case of individuals migrating by Gaussian diffusion, and by a sequence of L\'evy flights.Comment: 5 pages 2 figure

Australia's uncertain demographic future

The techniques of probabilistic population forecasting are increasingly being recognised as a profitable means of overcoming many of the limitations of conventional deterministic variant population forecasts. This paper applies these techniques to present the first comprehensive set of probabilistic population forecasts for Australia. We stress the disadvantages of directly inputting net migration into the cohort component model in probabilistic forecasting, and propose a gross migration flows model which distinguishes between permanent and non-permanent immigration and emigration. Our forecasts suggest that there is a two thirds probability of Australia’s population being between 23.0 and 25.8 million by 2026 and between 24.4 and 31.8 million by 2051. Comparisons with the latest official population projections of the Australian Bureau of Statistics are made.Australia, migration, migration forecasts, population forecasting, probabilistic, uncertainty

Demographic trends in Sweden

In the present note, we display the main features of recent trends in family-demographic behavior in Sweden. We update previously published indexes of marriage, divorce, and childbearing risks by calendar year in order to cover the developments up to 1999-2000, adding another two and three years of observation to our series.childbearing, divorce, marriage, Sweden

Demographic Data for Development: Overview Report

Presents findings from case studies in Ethiopia, Ghana, Senegal, and Uganda of the demand for and utilization of data by policy makers and the factors behind their underutilization. Explores ways to improve access to data needed to develop sound policies

Diffusion Approximations for Demographic Inference: DaDi

Models of demographic history (population sizes, migration rates, and divergence times) inferred from genetic data complement archeology and serve as null models in genome scans for selection. Most current inference methods are computationally limited to considering simple models or non-recombining data. We introduce a method based on a diffusion approximation to the joint frequency spectrum of genetic variation between populations. Our implementation, DaDi, can model up to three interacting populations and scales well to genome-wide data. We have applied DaDi to human data from Africa, Europe, and East Asia, building the most complex statistically well-characterized model of human migration out of Africa to date