Last month we blogged here at Demography is Destiny about the latest census figures from Canada.  These figures showed that the population of Canada had grown by 5.9% over the past five years and that that growth was, in large part, driven by immigration.  While Canada as a whole is growing, it does not seem as if the news is that good for the demographic future of French Canadians.  According to David Frum, writing in the Huffington Post,

“[i]n English, the census tells a story of growth and prosperity. In French, the census announces the decline of Quebec's standing in Confederation -- and of the French language's place in North America.”

In both 2001 and 2006 the Canadian cenuses showed declines in the proportion of the population that claimed French as a “mother tongue”.  By 2006, that… click here to read whole article and make comments

Happy Monday everyone! Here in NZ we are recovering from a “weather bomb”. For Auckland, that means that the last couple of days have been some of the best of the summer – and all we needed to do was wait for the autumn. Today I want to return to a drum that has been well beaten on this blog over the last few months. That drum is the phenomenon that is making itself felt in (particularly Western) societies throughout the world – an ageing population and a shrinking workforce.

This small article in the Economist shows the changes that will occur to various countries’ working age populations between 2010 and 2035.  Some countries, the Philippines, Egypt and Malaysia will see the number of their citizens aged 15-64 years old increase by about 40%.  There will be a much larger pool of… click here to read whole article and make comments

The Guardian newspaper is reporting that the Chinese Government is trying to “soften” its public message about its one-child policy. You know the one, that’s helping to cause a huge shortage of female children, involves forced abortion and is not averse to killing the mother in the process.  Unfortunately, the slogans used by the Government to promote this policy often conveyed “coldness, constraint and even threats. They easily caused resentment in people and led to social tension” according to the People’s Daily newspaper. (So they were entirely accurate and appropriate for the policy then?) One typical example of these older public slogans is:

“If sterilisation or abortion demands are rejected, houses will be toppled, cows confiscated”

Instead of threatened demolition of houses and forced confiscation of property, the newer slogans tend to promote the benefits of… click here to read whole article and make comments

Happy Monday everyone! The university year has started again here at Auckland and there are lots of fresh faces waiting with eager anticipation for the knowledge and insights that the university will dispense in the coming months…

Unless they are doing moral philosophy, they will probably not discuss the morality or otherwise of the sting operation that the UK Telegraph undertook recently. That doesn't mean that you get to miss out on that discussion though! I blogged about the results of that operation last Friday, and would be interested in your thoughts – is the secret filming of, and lying to, abortionists entrapment? Do the ends justify the means here? Is this debate merely a distraction and a smokescreen for the terrible facts that were uncovered? What do you think? For my part, I like the view put forward by my fellow mercatornet blogger, Mariette Ulrich in the… click here to read whole article and make comments

No, no, I cannot see into the future. Nor do I have a hotline to the UK Telegraph’s investigative reporting team.  It was just sheer dumb luck that the day after I finished a three part series looking into the worldwide phenomenon of sex-selective abortions (see the last three “Demography is Destiny” posts) the story broke in the UK that abortionists were allowing women to abort their babies on the ground of gender. Pregnant women went to various abortion clinics with a reporter posing as a supportive relative who was secretly filming.  There are interesting ethical issues here about the use of secret filming and entrapment.  Or are there? Is this any different from normal “target” style shows that secretly film different customer service representatives to see how they act?

Leaving that to one side, have a look at the story and the… click here to read whole article and make comments

Today I bring you the last in a three-part blog series on Nicholas Eberstadt’s article in the New Atlantis entitled “The Global War Against Baby Girls”.  On Friday, we talked about the problem of female feticide in China. On Monday, we looked at the problem elsewhere in the world. Today, Ebertadt article looks at the global effect of this problem and whether there is any hope for the future.

The first thing to realise is that the problem of sex-selective abortions and neglect of female infants is truly massive.  Eberstadt, using the figures provided by the United Nations Population Division (UNPD) and the US Census Bureau’s International Programs Center (IPC), as well as official demographic statistics from various nations, estimates that those countries with a sex ratio at birth (SRB), or a sex ratio below the age of… click here to read whole article and make comments

Today I will continue to look at the article by Nicholas Eberstadt in the New Atlantic entitled “The Global War Against Baby Girls”.  On Friday I examined the first part of the article which focussed on the huge imbalance in the Chinese SRB (sex ratio at birth).  Now, I want to turn from the world’s largest country to other countries that are part of this insidious “global war”.  While China has had the one child policy for the last 30 odd years, Eberstadt’s article makes it clear that that is not the only reason for a marked preference for boy babies:

“…coercive family-planning programs are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for widespread female feticide. This much is evident from SRB trends in East Asia’s four “Little Dragons”: Hong Kong, Singapore (more specifically, Singapore’s ethnic Chinese), South… click here to read whole article and make comments

The first item that I wrote on this blog almost a year ago was about the gender imbalance in parts of Asia (particularly China) and the danger that it could lead to increased nationalism and war in that part of the world. I obviously liked to start the blog off on a happy note…Today, I want to return to that same theme and look at a long piece written by Nicholas Eberstadt and published in the Fall (Autumn for those of us not living in the US) 2011 edition of The New Atlantis.  Eberstadt is someone who we have quoted before – see this earlier blog detailing his article on the demographic decline of Russia.

Eberstadt’s New Atlantis article is provocatively entitled “The Global War Against Baby Girls”.  In it, he details the shocking statistics from various parts… click here to read whole article and make comments

According to the Christian Science Monitor, the Russian Prime Minister is seeking re-election to the presidency (for a third term) and is setting out his policy platform.  The fourth of his programmatic articles trying to convince Russians to vote for him in three weeks time (or else!) deals with his plans to reverse Russia’s population decline.  This is a longstanding problem for Russia and one that Putin has had some success in dealing with:

“When he first came to power 12 years ago, Putin inherited a catastrophic population crisis. The number of Russians was shrinking by 0.5 percent each year...But a decade of relative political stability, higher living standards, and public health campaigns have boosted male life expectancy from a 2003 low of 58 years to 63 today, and raised fertility rates from about 1.2 children-per-woman in 2002 to 1.6 in… click here to read whole article and make comments

After discussing Canada’s latest census figures at the end of last week, I’d like to talk about some more news coming out of Canada today (hopefully this won’t be considered a Canadian overload…if indeed there can possibly be such an affliction).  This latest news is about the cost of an ageing population on the cost of healthcare.  According to Maclean magazine, the major driver of spiralling healthcare is not the ageing of the population, but the cost of health technology:

“As a recent report by the credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s argues, your grandmother’s visits to the doctor aren’t the key driver of health costs. Health technology, however—encompassing anything from drugs to diagnostic imaging—is becoming the great burden on the health systems of G20 countries…

Despite the popular rhetoric about the “gray tsunami” continually bandied… click here to read whole article and make comments