It is in fact a common feature of the capital transfer that was important even to the european development of the second tier european countries that exported the labor and is now important for the eastern europe. Within the african countries it is important for flows within the continent, unlike the implied assumption made that this is only to european countries
It means some posters have views of african based on the color of the inhabitants.
Yes and perhaps it has been neglected in the past decade in favor of the economic policy reforms but when it is possible to point for the local policy makers references to other african countries, including the north african like the Morocco making the positive policy reform and the demographic change, for very good sustained economic growth, it is useful. The
The economic opportunity and non agricultural labor opportunities help greatly and the economic growth of the past decade has shown the potential. In the West african case, the return of the Côte d’Ivoire to stability will help greatly.
Also the reduction of the disease burden, and importantly for attacking the burden of the malaria will help as I believe personally this is a strong contributor to the cultural desire for the children as the mortality in the infancy remains high.
Air pollution is gross but is not a serious impediment to the world’s population. It’s also a fixable problem, as evidence by the many, many examples of it being fixed.
If the claim is specifically about race as opposed to culture, it’s even weaker. There are some of the Caribbean island nations, populated overwhelmingly by people of West African descent, that have fertility rates well below the United States.
My WAG guess for the Black fertility rate in South Africa, based on their share of the population, would be around 2.35 or so (around the same as Botswana), but if anyone has actual data I’d be interested to see it. In the mid-1950s it was 6.8, comparable to Niger (6.9) today.
Whether or not a family left behind becomes beggars from the exported skilled worker is a question of how gently you want to put it, I guess.
China, India and the Philippines have had some success with this model.
For african nations, the dilemma is going to be creating the skilled workers in the first place and being able to afford to lose them in the second place.
There is already a paucity of intelligentsia, and exporting low-wage earners is not as good a way to get money, obviously. On the other hand, you need highly skilled workers to stay at home if you do not have an oversupply, because you cannot develop for the long term if they all bail for greener pastures. Remittances can be a value add to GDP (something like 10% for the Philippines?) but they can’t be a mainstay . You can’t become a developed nation begging from those who left.
Given the population explosion predicted to occur, the challenge will be ways to maintain economic growth in the face of many more mouths to feed. Perhaps the question is whether the population growth predictions are accurate or the expectations for GDP growth are accurate. I personally think it’s an either/or.
As outside nations come in and develop the natural resources, the question in my mind is going to be whether or not the african nations who own them will be able to keep a substantial piece of the pie, or whether a combination of poor management and poor central government will fritter away the opportunity. I do not see real industrialization and manufacturing being successful in the forseeable future for most african nations.
I certainly hope I am wrong, because the alternative to modern industrialization and manufacturing is to watch your resources get plundered while you are just trying to keep up with a burgeoning population.
Well, at least we are reading the same background articles.
From your cite:
*"Although global growth is projected to gradually strengthen, an expected deceleration in emerging markets and a rebalancing of Chinese demand toward private consumption will make the external environment less supportive for the region.
International stakeholders should be prepared to engage with these countries on a long-term basis, both to support their capacity building process and to provide the high levels of aid that may continue to be needed until the country has achieved a minimum level of resilience.
The study finds that many countries in the region have sustained a high level of public investment, but only some of them have managed to improve their infrastructure significantly.
The major obstacle to addressing the continent’s infrastructure deficit does not generally appear to be a lack of financing, but rather capacity constraints in developing and implementing projects.
More specifically, countries should strengthen their public financial management capacity by upgrading their methods to plan, execute, and monitor public investment, strengthening their project appraisal procedures, and adopting a medium-term budgetary framework that includes adequate provisions for the cost of operation and maintenance."*
If success for african nations boils down to the ability to plan, execute and monitor public investment along with adopting budgetary frameworks, all in the current context of population expansion, I’m not particularly hopeful.
Here are three different lists of fertility rates for every country in recent years:
Here’s a list of the median household income for some countries:
It appears to me that the most obvious mismatch to the generalization that high median household income means low fertility is Israel, which has a fertility rate somewhat above average but a household income somewhat more than average.
IIRC, Israel is one of the few countries where fertility has been increasing in recent years (largely because the extremely high fertility Haredim sects are becoming a larger share of the population).
“The Haredi fertility is stable, somewhere in the 6-10 TFR range depending on the community, while Arab TFR has dropped to 4 or below. Interestingly the secular Jewish TFR has also increased in the past generation, from 2.1 to 2.6. This is a reminder to be very careful of average values of fertility for a group. It seems that for ideological or cultural reasons the Haredi in Israel remain fertile, even after allowances for children were cut back, which had an immediate effect on Arab fertility. The lower Jewish aggregate fertility ignores the motive force of the Haredi within the larger community. Assuming current trends the Haredi will likely become the majority within Israel by about 2050.”
No, it doesn’t. Unless you also classify my one year old as a “beggar.” Or, say, the family of a deployed serviceman.
Remittances generally support the elderly, children, students and full-time caregivers: the same people who receive support in any middle class household in the world. The working age people, of course, are out getting the remittances.
Remittances typically go to things like school fees, improvements to the homestead, and emergency funds-- the same thing any other middle class family spends money on.
It has nothing to do with gently it is the simple economic model that has been seen across labor export across the many different income levels. You are ‘guessing’ out of non comprehension and other factors that cloud the perception of all things african.
And Poland and cental america and south western europe in the 19c etc. etc.
The model is not a mystery or a guess.
This is a false proposition showing that you have not either understood the remittances information provided or your views on capacity inherent are distorting.
The export of the labor is not simply the skilled workers and in fact in the majority it is not the skilled workers, not for the philippines, nor the indonesia nor the majority of countries where the remittances are important - unless you wish to pretend it is skilled labor
No, in fact it is a perfectly fine way to earn money in absorbing the otherwise under used labor factor and one that has been seen many times in the evolution of the economic history across many continents. There is not a mystery about this. The export of labor (that is then sending the remittances to families at home) to either the developed countries or to the more economically developed neighbors has proven to be over an entire century of records to be a good way to build local capital savings in the formal sectors which is invested locally - and it becomes much more powerful when the economic policy becomes positive to the private sector investment, but remains very important even in building the human capital (to pay for the school fees, the medical care, etc) and the improved housing capital (the improved house building that is very evident in all countries with such workers). These capital improvements have proven again and again to be extremely important and it is not based on “highly skilled” that are always a tiny numerical minority and not the majority of the remittance capital flows.
You have invented the problem of the "highly skilled"labor which is not what even sven said, but skilled, although I do not call the majority of the philippine labor export skilled - to make someone imagine the IT workers, it the café workers and the service sector workers and in some areas the industrial labor.
Even for the Indian case, which the americans always see through the eyes of the IT sector, a huge portion - I think even the absolute majority of the remittances - is in fact from the basic labor export for construction and other not skilled categories, not through sending the skilled IT worker to the USA, although this helped create the linkages backwards that eventually led to the creation of the domestic industry for the delocalisation to the Indian centres.
It is already the case that in most of the developing economies the ‘highly skilled’ labor makes a good wage locally and is less inclined to emigrate as the demand for them is more than supply in most cases. It is more the case that there is the capital shortage (and often the bad policies that make this the case) that limits expansion.
We already see from the economic history - the actual real development not invented assertions by persons who have not read either the economics or the history of the development or the specifics of the developing countries - that labor retention and the migration ceases as an economic infrastructure and the opportunities emerge, and that remittances have in many cases in europe and in asia been the significant contributors to the capital flow and the savings that have financed this development.
These are your prejudiced remarks without any foundation in the economic history that has the data that says you are completely wrong (never mind the false and prejudiced use of ‘begging’ since of course it is not in any way ‘begging’ for family labor to share monies earned internally to the family for the family savings or the family consumption - except of course “black people” are involved so the analysis and the discourse of some people goes a certain way…).
In actual fact, the economic history says, as it has been noted, that the capital flows of the remittances have in fact been very important in the building of the savings base and thus the capital base that have built needed economic infrastructure.
Thus your statement is empirically false from the demonstrated experiences in the european countries and the asian countries and even in the african countries like morocco and it is without it a foundation except in ignorance. The remittances alone of course do not allow for the best possible results, there is also needed the improved policy to support the economic growth, but we are already seeing these changes in the African countries that are reporting the highest sustained level of the economic growth (and following the Asian model
What a great surprise, and why? Because it would seem “Africa” and its people… Your analysis is not one that has much to inform it.
I doubt this completely and 100%.
Yes of course you are not hopeful, because ‘africa’ and its population specifics… Like in the ebola conversation as we saw and the never competence…
The actual fact of the infrastructure investment shows that the countries in sub saharan african countries that have adopted the better governance have shown the real improvements. The paths of this once adopted do not look very different from the paths of the asian or the north african peer countries. The changes in the governance culture are things that evolve, just like the economic policy and no country has made it all at once. The evolution has been seen before and it is now being seen in the leading economic developers of the continent, and like in the asian countries it will not be without bumps. But this is not strange or new or specific to black africans, whatever prejudices abound.
No, economic growth does not require population growth.
And ZPG does not imply an ageing population, except temporarily for some countries’ demographics.
Yes, that’s pretty much it. Basically there are stages of demographic transition that many countries go through. Very poor countries do often see an explosion in birth rate at the point they are able to feed their populations. This then levels off as the country becomes wealthier and standards of living and education increase.
This kind of boom and then levelling off has been seen many times; just look at home densely populated, but stable, much of western europe is and east asia is.
Fortunately all indications are that africa will peak long before reaching anything like that level of density, which is a good thing given the size of the continent.
Do you have any examples? Western Europe boosts immigration and imports labor. Russia has a shrinking population but until very recently their economy was buoyed by high oil prices.
Okay, but how old is this phenomenon?
Honest questions. I’d like to think the world will be okay with a stagnant population, but I’m not sure that will work without some Star Trekian utopia I’m pessimistic about human society achieving.
Against the claim that increasing population is a requirement for a growing economy? Sure.
Any wealthy country with a low absolute population e.g. Luxembourg
Any wealthy country with a low population density e.g. Sweden
Any country which has become significantly wealthier without it’s population changing markedly e.g. China.
Yes but this is primarily because of aforementioned ageing population issue (which is not the same issue as ZPG), market failures in terms of training people for the right things and treaties that mean countries are obliged to accept X immigrants. And it is controversial whether countries benefit in the long term; most WEurope countries are trying to increase immigration restrictions.
Which concedes the point that increasing population is a requirement of economic growth.
You haven’t given any reason to suppose it wouldn’t work.
I do think the development of natural resources will help spur economic growth, but I suspect much of the largesse will be siphoned off by corruption and external nations, leaving the average citizen looking much the same.
It is how you view overpopulation problem.There is enough food and water to go around for everyone.
The problem is rising housing costs every where even in the US. If everyone had American suburban dream this would cause major problems. Out side the US city density is very high. Most Americans would hate it.
The US is lucky to have low suburb density.The world of 7 billion people could not live in a typical American suburban density.The earth is just too small.
I have written “the paths once adopted” - the development path and trajectory in comparative from adoption of reform, not the simple time scale you present. It is the analysis of the proper economists, not naive unreferenced comparison.
We have already seen as the living standards for the population have already risen quite importantly in the past decade in the reforming countries, but of course for you ‘black people’ and genetic competence, non?
