Predicting the global population
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Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service, investigating the numbers in the news and in life. I'm Jan Wong. This week... How can a woman not know she's pregnant?
I got on the roller coasters and there's big signs saying that pregnant women should not be on them. An exciting day at the amusement park will turn into a nightmare rollercoaster ride for one woman. This is the real story of a woman who didn't know she was pregnant.
Just how uncommon is it for a woman to give birth without knowing she was pregnant? But first, and still in a roundabout way on the subject of babies, the United Nations Population Fund, UNFPA, recently published a report describing the world's ageing population.
Today we have one in nine persons aged 60 and over, but by 2050 it'll be... Two billion persons, one in five, will be 60 and over. And by that time, there will be more older persons than those under age 15 years. And this is no longer just a developed country phenomenon. It's happening faster, in fact, in developing countries. But most of them are not really prepared for the growing numbers of older persons.
That's Dr. Ann Porlichko from the UNFPA. She says we can be pretty confident about the numbers.
We can be very certain about the numbers for 2050 because persons who will be age 60 in 2050 are already born, so this is not speculation.
Fair enough. But in the longer term, the figures aren't going to be dominated by the likes of you and me. It's the birth of new people that will have the largest effect on future statistics. And here's where it gets interesting. For a long time, statisticians have observed something which they call the demographic transition.
The demographic transition is a shift of birth and death rates from high levels to low levels in a population. And that usually is a result of economic and social development. You have several stages. Typically, we speak of four stages. We have the first stage as high birth and high death rates where there's slow population growth. Then we have the second stage where you have high birth rate and falling death rates because of improvements in food supply, sanitation, technology, basic health care, education, et cetera. And that's where you have high growth rates. Then stage three, declining birth rates and relatively low death rates. And this is characterized by slow growth rate of the population. The growth begins to level off.
And then stage four is where you have low birth rates and low death rates, and consequently a low population growth.
So as countries get richer, their fertility rates drop. And it's long been assumed that that's the way it will continue to go. But what if it doesn't? Professor Jane Falkingham is director of the ESRC Centre for Population Change at Southampton University in the UK.
What recent UNFPA findings explain the world’s ageing population?
Historically, for the last 20, 30 years, fertility has been falling right across Europe. But actually, if we look at the most recent period, say across the last 10 years or so, we see rises in fertility in the most advanced countries. And in particular, if we look at countries in Scandinavia, for example, they now have the highest fertility rates in Europe, whereas in the countries we might have thought of having the highest rates, such as Italy and Spain, they actually have the lowest rates of fertility. The work that's been done around this is actually by Francesco Bellari, who's a new professor at Oxford University. So you might like to go and speak to him about it.
My name is Francesco Billeri. I'm professor of sociology and demography at the University of Oxford. Just after the year 2000, suddenly fertility was on the increase in several societies.
the pattern that you've observed is largely for a very few rich countries. Could it be that that's just due to immigration into those countries?
We did some calculations and basically the new change is not only due to migration, also the locals are changing. Also because it's the basic structure of institutions in society that is changing. Daycare is developing, other solutions are
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