an Eldis Resource

This paper identifies the factors that will be most important in shaping the worldwide demographic landscape in 2020 and beyond. It examines how societies are coping with the broad range of demographic challenges and assesses what conditions may be key to transforming demographic trends into security issues of interest to the United States and allies.

Key findings suggest:

• the population of the region that served as the locus for most 20th Century history - Europe and Russia - will shrink dramatically in relative terms; almost all population growth will occur in developing nations that until now have occupied places on the fringes of the global economy
• Of the 1..5 billion people that the world population will gain by 2020, most will be added to states in Asia and Africa
• The world will be older and far less Caucasian, and it will be far more concentrated in urban areas - by 2015, for the first time in human history, a majority of the world’s population will live in cities
• By 2050, the global 65+ age cohort will triple in size to about 1.5 billion, or 16 percent of the total
• Despite the general trend toward aging, many developing nations will experience substantial youth bulges: the largest proportional youth populations will be located in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Iraq

Authors suggest that

• allies in the industrialized world will face an unprecedented crisis of aging
• the aging challenge could reduce Japan’s economic power
• an older Europe will be less willing to face up to global hotspots

Paper finishes with three scenarios of what the world might look like in 50 years given the demographic trends:

1. Fertility drives the trends

• suggesting AIDS and fertility are the most important factors in determining the lowest population scenario, and life expectancy and fertility are the most important factors in projecting the highest population figures and that the correlation between GDP per capita and total fertility rates is high

2. Orderly progress

• this is a scenario where the world reaches a population peak and then permanently declines under noncatastrophic conditions

3. What can go wrong will go wrong

• democratization without institutional reform and the presence of a large middle class lead to instability and there is the possibility that breakdowns occur in bigger, developed, urban places where the United States may not be able to intervene
• the “natives will get restless” and governments will respond by expanding their security services instead of imposing institutional reforms, which would be more difficult
• Technology will empower both state and nonstate actors, making adversaries more difficult to identify

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