Youthful and ageing populations
A society runs on a balance between the people who work and the people who depend on them. When that balance tips too far in one direction, governments struggle to provide enough housing, schools, hospitals and jobs. Some places become crowded and very young. Others grow old, and some lose people altogether. Each pattern brings its own problems and, sometimes, its own opportunities.
The cartoon jokes that life on land has become so crowded that one fish decides evolution is not worth the trouble. Behind the joke is a real cost of population growth that millions of city dwellers feel every day.
Geographers usually split a population into three age groups:
- young, aged under 15
- working age, aged 15–59
- elderly, aged 60 and over
Some sources start the elderly group at 65 instead of 60.
A population in which the share of young people is very large compared with the working-age group.
A population in which the share of elderly people is relatively high compared with the working-age group.
The working-age group matters most to a government. These people earn wages and pay the taxes that fund schools for the young and care for the old. If either dependent group grows too large, the workers carry a heavier load. Reading these structures from a population pyramid is covered in the lesson on population trends.
Think of a household with a fixed number of earners. If several new babies arrive, or several grandparents move in, the same wages must stretch further. A country faces the same squeeze, only with millions of people.
Niger shows a youthful population at its most extreme. In 2017, 49% of Niger's people were under 15, compared with 17.6% in the UK. Other figures for Niger help explain why:
- fertility rate of 6.49 births per woman
- birth rate of 44 live births per 1,000 people
- population growth of 3% per year
- only 18.9% of people using contraception (the contraception rate)
- an average age of 18 for a woman's first birth
- infant mortality of 81 deaths per 1,000 live births, and life expectancy of 60
Policymakers in Niger have to look about 20 years ahead. Today's children will soon need secondary schools, then jobs and homes, and then they will start families of their own. Money spent on one service, such as health, is money not spent on another, such as transport, so these decisions can cause conflict.
A large young generation can also become a strength. Once these young people reach working age, some countries treat them as a resource that draws in foreign investors.
The economic boost a country can gain when a large youthful population grows into a large working-age population that attracts foreign investors.
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