I'm repeating what I wrote in my respone to your initial post - yes, higher wealth and education is inversely related to birth rates. The problem for China is that it can't really wait for it to happen on its own as we have in Europe, North America, Japan etc because, as I pointed out, they have some rather pressing resource use problems. As I said before, Japan will face less of a problem with its higher dependency ratio - it's a creditor nation which means that it can call back money that it has invested overseas - much of it in US bonds and stock markets. If done gradually, not much of a problem. Japan would then gradually turn into a debtor country and would require domestic economic growth to pay its way because pretty soon it would stop giving all those generous benefits to the elderly. That means that the family would have to care for the elderly and that would be hard since many may not have families - because no children. So lots of poverty for the elderly, I think.
In a country like the US - it's rather different. America is a debtor country right now - high current account and fiscal deficits - so a high dependency ratio it would affect us much more rapidly than Japan. The nice thing is that our birth and immigration rates mean that our dependency ratio won't rise to Japan's levels and therefore we won't have the problems that Japan will have - fewer tax-payers and more dependents. Additionally, if we fund social security adequately now, we can get through the next 2-3 decades without too much economic or social upheaval. The countries you are talking about where things are more extreme are Japan and Italy, followed by other European nations. The new world is less prone to these problems right now.
Not sure what this does to your worldbuilding but I hope it helps. The OECD does a lot of this work - go to oecd.org and look around their online publications.
no subject
Date: 23 Nov 2004 12:06 am (UTC)In a country like the US - it's rather different. America is a debtor country right now - high current account and fiscal deficits - so a high dependency ratio it would affect us much more rapidly than Japan. The nice thing is that our birth and immigration rates mean that our dependency ratio won't rise to Japan's levels and therefore we won't have the problems that Japan will have - fewer tax-payers and more dependents. Additionally, if we fund social security adequately now, we can get through the next 2-3 decades without too much economic or social upheaval. The countries you are talking about where things are more extreme are Japan and Italy, followed by other European nations. The new world is less prone to these problems right now.
Not sure what this does to your worldbuilding but I hope it helps. The OECD does a lot of this work - go to oecd.org and look around their online publications.