Population Dynamics in India and Implications for Economic Growth

Demographic change in India is opening up new economic opportunities. As in many countries, declining infant and child mortality helped to spark lower fertility, effectively resulting in a temporary baby boom. As this cohort moves into working ages, India finds itself with a potentially higher share of workers as compared with dependents. If working-age people can be productively employed, India's economic growth stands to accelerate. Theoretical and empirical literature on the effect of demographics on labor supply, savings, and economic growth underpins this effort to understand and forecast economic growth in India. Policy choices can potentiate India's realization of economic benefits stemming from demographic change. Failure to take advantage of the opportunities inherent in demographic change can lead to economic stagnation.age structure, China-India comparison, conditional convergence, demographic dividend, demographic transition, economic growth, economic growth in India, policy reform, population health, population of India

Arbitrator Behavior in Public Sector Wage Disputes

This study analyzes a new set of data on the decisions of conventional arbitrators. The main goal is to draw inferences about the extent to which conventional arbitration decisions are fashioned as mechanical compromises of the parties' final offers, without reference to the exogenous facts involved in different disputes. The results of the analysis are remarkably clear: conventional arbitrators tend to split-the-difference between the parties' final offers with virtually no evidence of additional systematic reference to the facts of the cases. However, since there is a substantial amount of unexplained variance in the arbitration decisions, this evidence of mechanical compromise behavior should be viewed as characterizing the overall operation of conventional arbitration mechanisms and not the behavior of individual arbitrators in any particular case. Indeed, the results are consistent with the view that individual arbitrators pay close attention to the facts of the cases, but that there is considerable variation in the structure of different arbitrators' preference functions.

Financial incentives for return of service in underserved areas: a systematic review

Of the 42 reviewed studies 33 investigated financial-incentive programs in the US. The remaining studies evaluated programs in Japan (five studies), Canada (two), New Zealand (one) and South Africa (one). The programs started between 1930 and 1998. We identified five different types of programs (service-requiring scholarships, educational loans with service requirements, service-option educational loans, loan repayment programs, and direct financial incentives). Financial incentives ranged from year-2000 United States dollars 1,358 to 28,470. All reviewed studies were observational. The random-effects estimate of the pooled proportion of all eligible program participants who had either fulfilled their obligation or were fulfilling it at the time of the study was 71% (95% confidence interval 60-80%). Seven studies compared retention in the same underserved area between program participants and non-participants. Six studies found that participants were less likely to remain in the same underserved area (five studies reported the difference to be statistically significant, while one study did not report a significance level); one study did not find a significant difference in retention in the same area. Twelve studies compared provision of care/retention in any underserved area between participants and non-participants. Ten studies found that participants were more likely to continue to practice in any underserved area (eight studies reported the difference to be statistically significant, while two studies did not provide the results of significance tests); two studies found that program participants were significantly less likely than non-participants to remain in any underserved area. Seven studies investigated the satisfaction of participants with aspects of their enrolment in financial-incentive programs; three studies examined the satisfaction of members of participants’ families with their lives in the undeserved area.Financial incentives, underserved areas,review

Booms, Busts, and Echoes: How the biggest demographic upheaval in history is affecting global development

For much (and perhaps most) of human history, demographic patterns were fairly stable: the human population grew slowly, and age structures, birth rates, and death rates changed very little. The slow long-run growth in population was interrupted periodically by epidemics and pandemics that could sharply reduce population numbers, but these events had little bearing on long-term trends.demography, growth, global development

Language, Employment and Earnings in the United States: Spanish-English Differentials from 1970 to 1990

This paper analyzes employment and earnings differentials between Spanish speakers and English speakers in the United States, using data from the 1970, 1980, and 1990 U.S. censuses. The results show that Spanish speakers, both men and women, do not perform as well in the labor market as English speakers. The results also reveal that Spanish-English earnings and unemployment differentials increased slightly in the 1970s, most likely because of rapid growth in the number of Spanish speakers. By contrast, these differentials increased sharply in the 1980s, also a period of rapidly increasing supply. However, there is no evidence that the widening of differentials in the 1980s reflects an increase in the labor market rewards to English language proficiency. Rather, they appear to be the result of Spanish speakers having relatively little of those labor market characteristics, most notably education, whose market value increased dramatically during the 1980s.

An Analysis of the Earnings of Canadian Immigrants

This paper reports estimates of simple wage equations fit to cross-sectional and pseudo-longitudinal data for Canadian immigrants in the 1971 and 1981 Canadian censuses. The estimates are used to assess (1) the usefulness of cross-sectional analyses for measuring the pace of immigrant earnings growth, (2) the labor market implications of admissions policies that place different weights on the work skills possessed by prospective entrants, and (3) the relative impact of selective outmigration and job-matching on the shape of immigrant earnings distributions as duration of stay increases. The estimates provide evidence of a small to moderate assimilation effect that suggests that immigrants make up for relatively low entry wages, although the wage catch-up is not complete until 13 to 22 years after entry into Canada. These results are revealed clearly in both the pseudo-longitudinal and the cross-sectional analyses. The estimates also provide evidence that the unobserved quality of immigrants' labor market skills declined following changes in Canada's immigration policies in 1974 that led to a sharp increase in the proportion of immigrants admitted on the basis of family ties. Finally, since there is no evidence that the variance of immigrant earnings increases with their duration of stay in Canada, and since there are no differential immigrant-native changes in higher-order moments of the earnings distribution as duration of stay increases, the results are inconclusive with respect to the importance of selective outmigration and job matching in the evolution of immigrant earnings distributions over time.

Global Demographic Change: Dimensions and Economic Significance

Transitions from high mortality and fertility to low mortality and fertility can be beneficial to economies as large baby boom cohorts enter the workforce and save for retirement, while rising longevity has perhaps increased both the incentive to invest in education and to save for retirement. We present estimates of a model of economic growth that highlights the positive effects of demographic change during 1960-95. We also show how Ireland benefited from lower fertility in the form of higher labor supply per capita and how Taiwan benefited through increased savings rates. We emphasize, however, that the realization of the potential benefits associated with the demographic transition appears to be dependent on institutions and policies, requiring the productive employment of the potential workers and savings the transition generates. Economic projections based on an "accounting" approach that assumes constant age-specific behavior are likely to be seriously misleading.

What Are the Determinants of Delayed Childbearing and Permanent Childlessness in the United States?

This paper presents estimates of delayed childbearing and permanent childlessness in the United States and the determinants of those phenomena.The estimates are derived by fitting the Coale-McNeil marriage model to survey data on age at first birth and by letting the parameters of the model depend on covariates. Substantively, the results provide evidence that the low first birth fertility rates experienced in the 1970's were due to both delayed childbearing and to increasing levels of permanent childlessness. The results also indicate that (a) delayed childbearing is less prevalent among blackwomen than among non-black women, (b) education and labor force participation are important determinants of delayed childbearing, (c) the influence of education and labor force participation on delayed childbearing seems to beincreasing across cohorts, (d) education is positively associated with heterogeneity among women in their age at first birth, (d) the dispersion of age at first birth is increasing across cohorts, (f) race has an insignificant effecton childlessness, and (g) education is positively associated with childlessness, with the effect of education increasing and reaching strikingly highlevels for the most recent cohorts.

The Future of South Asia: Population Dynamics, Economic Prospects, and Regional Coherence

What do we foresee for South Asia in 2060, in light of the significant changes it has undergone in the past few decades? India has experienced rapid economic growth, but continues to suffer widespread, extreme poverty as well. Afghanistan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka have seen major conflicts, with Pakistan always seeming on the verge of a major eruption. Nepal and Sri Lanka finally seem to have moved toward peace. As elsewhere, the region's many developments and crosscurrents make reliable predictions difficult, but one relatively neglected set of factors – demographic change – may shed some light on the region's future. Throughout the world, falling mortality rates and declining birth rates have been predictive of growing per-capita incomes, and theoretical reasoning and related evidence are sufficiently compelling to think that the links may indeed be causal. In this vein, this essay explores South Asia's economic prospects through a demographic lens. In addition, as we will see, there are some similar demographic trends across the countries of South Asia, but there are also a number of extreme differences. Regional heterogeneity bears on the question, "to what extent is South Asia a coherent region?"South Asia, demographic change, economic prospects, demographic trends, regional heterogeneity

Is an Integrated Regional Labor Market Emergin in East and Southeast Asia?

We examine labor market integration in east and southeast Asia (ESEA) during the 1980s, focusing on intraregional labor mobility and on the two other main channels of integration: capital mobility and trade. We find evidence that labor market integration increased sharply among ESEA countries in the 1980s, with 9 percent of ESEA's labor force participating either directly via labor mobility or indirectly via capital mobility or trade in cross-national labor market transactions in 1991, up from just 5.2 percent in 1980. We also find that trade is the dominant mechanism through which regional labor market integration occurred in the 1980s, with labor migration contributing only modestly to the process.