Demography as a science has been underestimated for many years. However, this attitude has changed dramatically at the beginning of the 21st century, when the World Community faced the problem of aging and the decrease in native population of developed countries, as the consequence of world political and economical processes. According to UNO statistics, by the 2050 the number of people over 60 years old will have reached 1 billion people that is going to be 1/6 of the world population.
The main reason of depopulation of developed countries is natural decline in population, in otherwords, excess of the death rate over the birth rate. This tendency is clearly expressed in Russia: for instance, the population size of the Russian Federation decreased on 781.4 thousand people in 2009, which is 7% more than in 2008. These figures show that we have dismissed the fact that not only the demography depends on the economy, thus economy efficiency totally depends on the demography.
It is a commonly known fact that in the USA this tendency began even earlier than in Russia, approximately at the beginning of the 1970s. However, it was leveled with the immigration of the educated members of the society. Thus in Russia, this situation turned out to be a catastrophe as every year about 100 thousand people leave Russia for other countries.
In spite of the fact that a lot of immigrants from Middle East come to Russia seeking better life, the demographical situation has not improved, as we are talking about native population. These immigrants require less moneyto be payed for doing various jobs, which leads to the shortage of working places and economical instability for the native dwellers. As a consequence, native population cannot afford having more than 2 children. The recent statistic have figure out that 1.2 babies are born per each woman a year, thus to change the situation this rate should leap up to 3.15.
Another reason of depopulation is aging,
in other words excess of the death rate over the birth rate leads to the fact that the average level of the population age tents to be more that 45-50 years. For instance, the middle age of the British native population is 45 years. That can lead to the shortage of the native workforce in the nearest future. Moreover, this reason of depopulation can be also caused by the high level of health care facilities, as in Germany, where the birth rate has not changed dramatically, thus elderly people tend to live longer, or the combination of these 2 reasons, as in Japan, where the birth rate has declined significantly because the country dwellers cannot afford enough time for having 2 or more children as well as elderly people get enough care to live up to 85 years.
However, migration and the rise of the birth rate is not enough. It is pension system that must be reformed in the nearest future in the developed countries to involve in the work more female employees and elderly people to increase labour productivity. Favorable working conditions and pension schemes will allow them to continue bringing contribution to economy. These measures will help not only to level the shortage of the workforce, but to allow elderly people to have children. Moreover, retirement age should be changed to 65-70 years.
Despite the fact that some urgent measures have been taken recently to solve the problem (for instance, Russian government offers contracts to families with 2 children to support their 3rd, 4th and other offspring, thus this policy is available only for city dwellers), they are not enough and the solution doesn`t lie on the surface. It requires a lot of funds and investments: deep reforms should be held on improvement of work of the financial markets to increase the level of savings and investments. Furthermore, the labour market should become more flexible to allow young specialists to find a job with a decent salary to afford having enough children to increase the birth rate. Besides, some bonuses and benefits should be offered to large family to make the idea of having a lot of children popular within the native country dwellers.
The problem of aging and decline of the native dwellers is considered to be vital for some nations. However, some experts believe it to be a stage of the evolution of the human society, which reflects in accumulating of intellectual possibilities of the population but not biomass escalating. Thus, in spite of these arguments, the World Community should thing about the effective solutions of these burning issues.
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