Demographics and fertility rates

An aging population is the elephant in the room for most western societies, but it is also an issue for many governments behind the fallen Iron curtain and China.

Especially in the west, unfunded pension and health care costs will eventually destroy their fiscal solvency along with their currencies and standard of living.

Fertility rates of select countries

Keeping in mind that 2.2 is the minimum replacement fertility rate required to retain population equilibrium, refer to Table 1ⁱ. See the referenced UN website for a full list.

Immigration effects

Immigration is not captured in fertility rates, but for most countries immigration policies do not significantly affect current population trajectories.

In fact, no civilization has ever undergone immigration rates needed to alter the actuarial estimates and survived. European countries already suffer civil unrest as they grapple with cultural assimilation of current policies.

Special circumstances

China suffers a further issue; like Hitler’s Germany China flirted with eugenics and population control theories which were popular in western academic circles at the time. Abortion and familial engineering has left China with a 1.07 male/female ratio that could climb to 1.11 before it begins to revert to mean. History can not tell us what such an artificially contrived population will look like, or what unrest it will cause.

On the Iron Curtain front, the collapse of communism has left huge masses of poor populations governed by corrupt states. These populations are declining even faster as people flee to alternative geographies to reunite with loved ones and escape crumbling infrastructure and mafia like living conditions. Mortality rates and life expectancies are also higher. As example, Russia’s population is already declining at an ever increasing rate. It has the GDP of Texas while its population equals all of California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Ohio combined.

i “World Population Prospects, the 2010 Revision,” United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, n.d., http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Sorting-Tables/tab-sorting_fertility.htm.

UPDATE: The Hoover Institution has a more detailed analysis of Asian and Russian demographics in their article Power and population in Asia. The tables alone are worth a look.