The feature story (“Somewhere over the Rainbow”) in this week’s The Economist (January 26th-February 1), asks the question: Is the world really becoming worse for the majority of mankind? The answer, according to The Economist is “the world seems to be in rather better shape than most people realize.”
It is, no doubt, worthwhile to recognize global successes, even as we ponder with some uneasiness future prospects. Success, like failure, can be a great teacher.
When The Economist sat back and looked at the global successes of the past decade, here’s what it concluded:
All these things are the results of patient work over many years. But perhaps the biggest change affecting people's lives has little to do, at least directly, with development policy or public spending. People in poor countries are now able to exert more control over their own fertility, and hence over the size of their families.
A generation ago the biggest worry about poor countries was over-population. Books such as “The Population Bomb” (1968) and “The Limits to Growth” (1972) predicted Malthusian crises in countries where women were having five children or more. Since then the fertility rate (the average number of children a woman can expect during her lifetime) in low- and middle-income countries has crashed. In East Asia and the Pacific, the rate was 5.4 in 1970. Now it is 2.1. In South Asia, the fertility rate halved (from 6.0 to 3.1). In the world as a whole, fertility has fallen from 4.8 to 2.6 in a generation (25 years).
Later on the article notes that:
….demographic changes help to create a virtuous circle of growth. When fertility rises then falls, you get a bulge of people at and just after the inflection point. The baby boomers were one such bulge. Between 1960 and 1990 Europe and America had relatively few old people (because mortality rates had earlier been high), relatively few children (because fertility had fallen) and a disproportionately big number of economically active adults.
These 30 boom years were (to borrow the French phrase) “les trente glorieuses”. Developing countries are seeing a similar confluence now.
But not all countries have undergone a successful demographic transition. Somewhere behind the rainbow, as the article itself points out, there are still countries mired in trouble:
An extraordinary concentration of misfortunes is to be found in a group of countries which the World Bank labels “fragile”. This is a slightly larger category than the so-called failed states, such as Somalia, where the central government has ceased to exist. It includes countries where the government has partial control of territory (Sudan), where it cannot deliver basic services (Zimbabwe) and places with high levels of political conflict (Nigeria).
Fragile states contain roughly half the developing world's childhood deaths. About a third of their people are undernourished and more than that do not have access to drinking water. They usually have extremely high fertility rates: most of the countries with fertility rates over 5.0 are fragile. In one way or another, they are much more likely to be affected by wars, refugees and every sort of political crisis.
The lesson that might be gleaned from global successes and failures is that empowering couples to control their own fertility is a recipe for success, or at least a fundamental ingredient. The article, however, appears in the end to credit globalization and good government as the keys to success.
Bad government and lack of growth often, though far from always, go together. Whatever the problems of globalisation, they are dwarfed by the penalties of being untouched by it.
Perhaps. But make family planning services more widely available to the couples who want them might also help.
Tomorrow, we will take a closer look at the World Bank and its index of “fragile states.”
