Joe Studwell

one always discussed demographics in Asia because it was always relevant, but you didn't discuss it that much because it was never a problem.

Asia in 1960 always had a sufficient demographic density to be able to pay for its infrastructure, to have deep concentrated urban markets, to raise taxes.

I mean, all of the stuff that you need to do developmentally.

So

I had never thought in two, three decades working in Asia of demographics as something that could fundamentally constrain economic development.

It was just a sort of marginal variable.

Well, when you have super low population density, as you did in Africa, if you go back to the end of the Second World War, Africa is this vast landmass into which you can fit China, India, Europe, and the US.

I mean, it's hard to believe, but if you cut the countries out of an atlas and try, you'll find that that's correct.

That's how vast Africa is, and yet it had only 220 million people at the end of the Second World War.

The constraint that that produces is that you get population density averaged over Africa of less than 10 people per square kilometre.

You think of the size of a square kilometre and only 10 people in it, it's very few.

And the impact that this has economically is, well, you don't have markets, you don't have meaningful concentrated markets.

So if you think 1900, for Africa, the two biggest cities were Lagos and Dar es Salaam, and they had populations of 20,000 people.

And this is a time when cities like Singapore or Shanghai in East Asia had a quarter of a million or half a million in the case of Africa.

of Singapore.

So it's just a different order of magnitude.

So you haven't got concentrated centres of population that demand goods and will reliably pay for goods and services.

And also cities have always been very, very important historically as places to raise tax.

It's always been much easier to get tax off urbanites than it is off people living in a dispersed condition in the countryside.

So you have that problem.