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Posthaste: The world’s population explosion has been defused — but now there's a new time bomb Back to video

Good morning,

For a long time now one of the world’s biggest worries has been that rapid population growth would bring on food shortages, widespread unemployment, depletion of natural resources and environmental destruction.

Just earlier this month, total world population passed 8 billion, reigniting these long-standing fears.

But David Bloom and Leo Zucker of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, writing for the International Monetary Fund, say the most formidable demographic challenge now facing the world is no longer population growth — it is aging.

“The spectre of a global population bomb has in reality been defused (or, rather, fizzled naturally,” wrote the pair.

The world’s rate of population growth has slowed in recent decades and is projected to continue slowing, they said. Even India which is expected to pass China to become the world’s most populous country in 2023 is forecast to have a population growth rate of 0.7 per cent between 2020 and 2040, half of its 2000 to 2020 rate and less than the global average of 0.8 per cent.

UN projections calculate that the number of countries experiencing annual population decline will increase from 41 in 2022 to 88 in 2050.

“What is fast becoming universal is that population aging is the most pervasive and dominant global demographic trend, owing to declining fertility, increasing longevity and the progression of large cohorts into older ages,” they said.

This is more than the baby boom bubble. People are living longer. Global life expectancy has risen from 34 years in 1913 to 72 years in 2022, a trajectory that is expected to continue upward. Meanwhile, between 1970 and 2020, fertility dropped in every country in the world, the authors said.

When the United Nations was established after the Second World War in 1945, there were seven times more children under 15 than people 65 and over. By 2050, these two groups will be about the same size.

“These shifts portend a colossal set of health, social and economic challenges in the coming decades. They also signal the heretofore unlikely prospect of widespread depopulation,” they said.

Bloom and Zucker said addressing the challenge will require changes to lifestyle behaviours and public and private investments, policy reforms and technological innovation.

But the consequences of ignoring it are dire: a dwindling workforce struggling to support  a growing number of retirees, an explosion of age-related illnesses, rising  health costs and a declining quality of life for the aged because of a lack of human, financial and institutional resources,  they said.

The bright side of demographic changes is that they are predictable so societies have some time to prepare.

And there are things that can be done. To prepare for the economic impact, investment initiatives should focus on sustaining economic growth despite declines in the share of the working population, said Bloom and Zucker. Training programs should be geared to increasing productivity of those already in the workforce and encouraging others to enter it such as mothers and older people.

Relaxed restrictions on immigration would also help fill the gaps in countries where the workforce is depleted by age.

“Africa, for example, has a surplus of young people searching for jobs while Europe, with an older population, has a plethora of jobs in search of workers,” wrote the pair.

Bloom and Zucker said the pandemic contained lessons that could help the world to prepare for this new challenge.

“The most obvious takeaway is the need for enhanced preparedness,” they said.

“As the world disposes of the population growth bomb and seeks to fortify itself against the explosion of population aging, these lessons suggest a pathway for rewiring the global approach to healthy aging.”

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Once nickel king for the world, Canada’s dominance in the metal has fallen over the years. In the 1960s Canada produced 80 per cent of the world’s nickel, with Sudbury, Ont. alone, churning out half of the global production between 1905 and 1966.

Today, Indonesia is the nickel powerhouse, accounting for 39 per cent of global supply in 2021, more than triple its nearest competitors, the Philippines, which produced 12.8 per cent, and Russia about 11 per cent. Canada’s share has shrank to six per cent, about the same as Australia’s. Still these last two countries were deemed big enough producers to be approached by Indonesia at the recent G20 summit with the idea of creating an OPEC-like cartel for the metal. Find out how that idea went over back home here.

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Credit is not inherently good or bad in itself. It is how we choose to use it that makes it helpful or harmful, writes Sandra Fry for the Financial Post.

It can be a great tool but credit is not a right; it’s a privilege that is earned after proving you have a history of repaying your debt as agreed. This holiday shopping season, Fry has writes.

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Today’s Posthaste was written by Pamela Heaven, @pamheaven, with additional reporting from The Canadian Press, Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg.

Have a story idea, pitch, embargoed report, or a suggestion for this newsletter? Email us at posthaste@postmedia.com, or hit reply to send us a note.