Demographic Transition in Japan, China, India and South Africa and their economic impacts—A comparison and the way Ahead for India

EasyChair Preprint 3516

Abstract

In his book, “Wealth of Nations”, Adam Smith in 1776 had first raised the question of why some countries are rich and other countries are poor. The prominent explanation with the economists for the phenomenon has been the differences in physical capital and technological knowhow. Here physical capital includes population of a country also among many other components.

The differences in wealth of nations have been in existence historically. The extent of inequalities has been very large and even today they do exist and hence the phenomenon is disturbing. It is an undisputed fact that population of a country does have some effect on economic growth of a country but the extent to which the population size and composition affects the economy has been a subject matter of study with many researchers. This paper studies the demographic transition of the four countries, selected on the basis of their different start/threshold state, differential variation in birth and death rates and also differences in occurrences of diseases like HIV etc. like South Africa, which had started with lesser threshold of population but could not follow the expected demographic transition as the death rates have not decreased as expected due to higher incidences of HIV/AIDS and as a result could not achieve that much of economic growth as was expected. Another reason for choosing South Africa is that this country is a current regional leader in Africa in terms of its institutional quality. The paper puts in perspective the major factors responsible for such differential economic growth across the countries in the world with specific reference to India. In the end the paper will examine the lessons to be drawn for India in order to capitalize fully the demographic dividend available to India.

Keyphrases: Demographic Dividend, dependency ratio, population

@booklet{EasyChair:3516,
  author    = {Brij Behari Dave},
  title     = {Demographic Transition in Japan, China, India and South Africa and their economic impacts—A comparison and the way Ahead for India},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 3516},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2020}}