Pakistan: Demographic & Politics

tarek · 09-28-2004, 11:46 AM

Demographic convulsions

By Shahid Javed Burki

The world's Muslim population is variously estimated at between 1.2 and 1.5 billion. About three quarters of a billion is concentrated in what George W. Bush, the US president, calls the Greater Middle East.

That is a stretch of land between Morocco in the west and Pakistan in the east. Pakistan, with 152 million people, is the largest Muslim nation in this area followed by Turkey (73 million), Iran and Egypt (each 70 million), Saudi Arabia and Iraq (each 25 million).

All the people living in these countries are not Muslim but the proportion of non-Muslim populations is very small. Most of these countries have had high rates of population growth, high rates of urbanization, relatively slow rates of economic growth, and poor social and human development.

The American interest in bringing democracy to this part of the world as a part of the Greater Middle East initiative is to counter the increasing popularity of radical and extremist Islam.

How much of a factor is demographic development in creating receptive grounds in some of these countries for the rapid growth of radicalism and extremism? To answer this question, we must look not just at the rates of population growth and urbanization but probe deeper into the way these populations have developed their thinking, attitudes and worldview.

Pakistan is an interesting case study for beginning to understand how a fairly large number of its people turned towards these forms of Islam to express their beliefs. By 2004, Pakistan had become an epicentre of these movements.

How did this transformation come about? Population growth, arrival of millions of refugees into the country from India soon after Pakistan was born, rapid urbanization, the chaotic growth of Karachi, migration of millions of people to the Middle East, events in the Muslim world, the way America waged its war against Islamic terrorism all played a role in this transformation.

In 2004, 57 years after its birth, Pakistan had a population of 152 million people; nearly five times more than the population at the time the country was born on August 14, 1947. In 1947, what was Pakistan then, including what was later to become Bangladesh, had a combined population of 72 million.

At that time, "old" Pakistan was the largest Muslim state and the fifth most populous country in the world. In 1971, Bangladesh separated and became an independent state.

That notwithstanding, in 2004 "new" Pakistan overtook Russia and became the world's sixth largest country, after China, India, the United States, Brazil and Indonesia. This continuous climb up the demographic ladder was the consequence of a very high rate of fertility, which translated into a high rate of population growth.

For much of Pakistan's history the country had one of the highest rates of fertility in the world with more than five children born per woman. One result of this was that Pakistan today has one of the youngest populations in the world, with 54 per cent of its people below the age of 20. Over the last few years, the rate of fertility has begun to decline and the rate at which the population is growing has slowed.

The government estimates the current rate of population growth at 2.1 per cent a year. Nonetheless, demographic inertia will continue to increase the size of the population and, if present trends don't change, Pakistan could overtake Indonesia, Brazil and the United States and become the world's third largest country by the year 2050.

Could Pakistan's much higher rate of population growth be attributed to the influence of Islam and the power of the mosque? Circumstantial evidence indicates that this might be the case.

The Muslim countries in the Middle East have considerably higher rates of fertility than the countries subscribing to different faiths. India, Pakistan's neighbour, not only has a lower rate of increase in its population, fertility rates have been declining significantly in recent years.

The only administration in Pakistan's history that made population planning a prominent part of public policy was the one headed by President Ayub Khan. This led to a stiff opposition by Islamic groups and contributed to his eventual fall.

For the population to be persuaded that it is in their interest to limit the size of families, the poor will have to be weaned away from the preaching of the illiterate mullahs. This can only be done by educating the masses.

In what way did the sharp increase in the country's population impact on its development? This question can be answered from several different perspectives: economic, social, political, and geo-political, of which the first usually receives the most attention.

Since the days of the British demographer Thomas Malthus, economists have worried about the burden a rapid population increase places on the economy. Malthus's particular concern was that agricultural production, especially food output, would not keep pace with population growth. He saw famines becoming commonplace unless a determined effort was made to control the increase in population.

In fact, recurrent famines in British India vindicated the British demographer. They also deeply influenced the economic growth of the areas that were later to become part of today's Pakistan.

In 1780, a huge famine killed a third of the population of Bengal - some five million people. Another famine in 1783-84 killed more than a fifth of the population of the Indian plains, this was followed by severe scarcities in 1791, 1801 and 1803.

The British administration studied the famine problem by appointing several Royal Commissions and eventually came to the conclusion that the only way out was to make large public investments to increase India's capacity to produce additional amounts of food.

This, they decided, could be done by bringing virgin land under cultivation, most of it in the provinces of Punjab and Sindh. Investments would be made in surface irrigation, in a network of roads and railways, and in the development of the port of Karachi.

These investments paid off handsomely and turned the wastelands of Punjab and Sindh into the granaries of British India. For decades, the Indians were spared the scourge of famines.

The last famine to hit the country was in 1943 but, as the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen was to point out in his seminal work on that particular tragedy, the cause was not a failure of food supply but the inability of the affected population to buy it.

The Malthusian fear continued to influence economic thinking until the early 1970s. In fact in 1974, at the World Food Conference held in Rome, there was a widespread apprehension that that moment had arrived.

That did not happen since about that time, new food growing technologies became available to increase the world's output. Pakistan was one of the countries to benefit from this development. The first "green revolution" based on high yielding seed technologies took hold in the country in the late 1960s and the early 1970s.

Between 1966 and 1976, output of wheat more than doubled, increasing from 3.9 million tons to 8.2 tons. This was equivalent to a rate of growth of 7.7 per cent a year, two and a half times the rate of increase in population. For rice the growth rate in the same period was a little lower, at 6.7 per cent a year but still very impressive. Rice production increased from 1.3 million tons to 2.5 million tons.

While Pakistan and other populous countries with rapidly increasing populations may have escaped famines, population growth in many ways became a severe burden.

One way of highlighting the damage caused by that burden is to speculate on the outcome of a somewhat slower rate of population growth, say one percentage point less than the actual rate of increase. In the case of Pakistan, population grew at the rate of 2.75 per cent a year to increase from less than 32 million in 1947 to 152 million in 2004.

In 2004, Pakistan's revised GDP was estimated at $96 billion, which meant an income per capita of $632. Had the population increased at the rate of 1.7 per cent a year, by 2004 it would have been about 84 million.

If the GDP had remained the same, income per capita could have been $1143. That would have been 80 per cent higher than the level reached in 2004. A one percentage point lower rate of growth in population would have pushed Pakistan into the ranks of middle income countries in the first few years of the 21st century, with per capita income higher than that of China.

However, the relationship between population and economic growth is more complicated than suggested by this simple arithmetic. Economists believe that population increase is one of the determinants of an economy's rate of growth since extra hands generally mean more output.

Looked at this way, population need not be a burden; it becomes a burden when the additional hand it makes available is not able to produce the amount of expected output. This happens when human development does not keep pace with population growth.

This was certainly the case in Pakistan. One reason why the country has done so poorly in terms of developing its vast human resource is that it did not have the wherewithal to commit for education and health.

A large and young population that does not have the education and training to enter the various sectors of the modern economy creates frustration, unhappiness, antagonism and ultimately leads to anti-social behaviour.

Such a population can become - in many cases it did become - the recruiting ground for extremist groups. In a way, therefore, Pakistan was to become an epicentre for Islamic extremism in part because of the rapid increase in its population.

There is also a direct correspondence between the rate of population growth and the incidence of poverty. Demography can keep the poor trapped in poverty in several different ways.

For a variety of reasons, poor families have higher rates of fertility than those located higher up in the income distribution scale. It takes education to recognize the economic advantage of small families.

The poor are generally not educated or poorly educated and tend to have larger families. When families are large, children tend to be closely spaced and this affects the health of the mother and also, with her inability to give enough time to her numerous children, the health of the entire family.

Large poor families are usually beset with serious health problems. When families are large, mothers tend to turn to their daughters for help with household chores, including the care of younger members of the family.

This makes it difficult for poor parents to educate their daughters; they cannot be spared from work in the house to go to school. This leads to illiteracy among women. Poor uneducated women have larger families and the link between high fertility rates and poverty continues to move along a vicious cycle.

Persistent high rates of population increase have kept the rate of economic growth relatively low, the incidence of poverty high, and the level of human development much below than what is expected of a country at Pakistan's stage of development.

It will take much more than simple acceleration in the rate of increase in GDP growth to break this cycle. But without a concerted effort to improve people's well being, the poor and the deprived in Pakistan will continue to be attracted towards extremist movements.

indianguy4u · 11-14-2005, 06:48 AM

Quote:

In 2004, Pakistan's revised GDP was estimated at $96 billion, which meant an income per capita of $632. Had the population increased at the rate of 1.7 per cent a year, by 2004 it would have been about 84 million.

If the GDP had remained the same, income per capita could have been $1143. That would have been 80 per cent higher than the level reached in 2004. A one percentage point lower rate of growth in population would have pushed Pakistan into the ranks of middle income countries in the first few years of the 21st century, with per capita income higher than that of China.

Interesting. Sameer, can u find similar result for India.

09-28-2004, 11:46 AM	#1 (permalink)
tarek *Senior Contributor* Join Date: 12-06-03 Posts: 996	Pakistan: Demographic & Politics Demographic convulsions By Shahid Javed Burki The world's Muslim population is variously estimated at between 1.2 and 1.5 billion. About three quarters of a billion is concentrated in what George W. Bush, the US president, calls the Greater Middle East. That is a stretch of land between Morocco in the west and Pakistan in the east. Pakistan, with 152 million people, is the largest Muslim nation in this area followed by Turkey (73 million), Iran and Egypt (each 70 million), Saudi Arabia and Iraq (each 25 million). All the people living in these countries are not Muslim but the proportion of non-Muslim populations is very small. Most of these countries have had high rates of population growth, high rates of urbanization, relatively slow rates of economic growth, and poor social and human development. The American interest in bringing democracy to this part of the world as a part of the Greater Middle East initiative is to counter the increasing popularity of radical and extremist Islam. How much of a factor is demographic development in creating receptive grounds in some of these countries for the rapid growth of radicalism and extremism? To answer this question, we must look not just at the rates of population growth and urbanization but probe deeper into the way these populations have developed their thinking, attitudes and worldview. Pakistan is an interesting case study for beginning to understand how a fairly large number of its people turned towards these forms of Islam to express their beliefs. By 2004, Pakistan had become an epicentre of these movements. How did this transformation come about? Population growth, arrival of millions of refugees into the country from India soon after Pakistan was born, rapid urbanization, the chaotic growth of Karachi, migration of millions of people to the Middle East, events in the Muslim world, the way America waged its war against Islamic terrorism all played a role in this transformation. In 2004, 57 years after its birth, Pakistan had a population of 152 million people; nearly five times more than the population at the time the country was born on August 14, 1947. In 1947, what was Pakistan then, including what was later to become Bangladesh, had a combined population of 72 million. At that time, "old" Pakistan was the largest Muslim state and the fifth most populous country in the world. In 1971, Bangladesh separated and became an independent state. That notwithstanding, in 2004 "new" Pakistan overtook Russia and became the world's sixth largest country, after China, India, the United States, Brazil and Indonesia. This continuous climb up the demographic ladder was the consequence of a very high rate of fertility, which translated into a high rate of population growth. For much of Pakistan's history the country had one of the highest rates of fertility in the world with more than five children born per woman. One result of this was that Pakistan today has one of the youngest populations in the world, with 54 per cent of its people below the age of 20. Over the last few years, the rate of fertility has begun to decline and the rate at which the population is growing has slowed. The government estimates the current rate of population growth at 2.1 per cent a year. Nonetheless, demographic inertia will continue to increase the size of the population and, if present trends don't change, Pakistan could overtake Indonesia, Brazil and the United States and become the world's third largest country by the year 2050. Could Pakistan's much higher rate of population growth be attributed to the influence of Islam and the power of the mosque? Circumstantial evidence indicates that this might be the case. The Muslim countries in the Middle East have considerably higher rates of fertility than the countries subscribing to different faiths. India, Pakistan's neighbour, not only has a lower rate of increase in its population, fertility rates have been declining significantly in recent years. The only administration in Pakistan's history that made population planning a prominent part of public policy was the one headed by President Ayub Khan. This led to a stiff opposition by Islamic groups and contributed to his eventual fall. For the population to be persuaded that it is in their interest to limit the size of families, the poor will have to be weaned away from the preaching of the illiterate mullahs. This can only be done by educating the masses. In what way did the sharp increase in the country's population impact on its development? This question can be answered from several different perspectives: economic, social, political, and geo-political, of which the first usually receives the most attention. Since the days of the British demographer Thomas Malthus, economists have worried about the burden a rapid population increase places on the economy. Malthus's particular concern was that agricultural production, especially food output, would not keep pace with population growth. He saw famines becoming commonplace unless a determined effort was made to control the increase in population. In fact, recurrent famines in British India vindicated the British demographer. They also deeply influenced the economic growth of the areas that were later to become part of today's Pakistan. In 1780, a huge famine killed a third of the population of Bengal - some five million people. Another famine in 1783-84 killed more than a fifth of the population of the Indian plains, this was followed by severe scarcities in 1791, 1801 and 1803. The British administration studied the famine problem by appointing several Royal Commissions and eventually came to the conclusion that the only way out was to make large public investments to increase India's capacity to produce additional amounts of food. This, they decided, could be done by bringing virgin land under cultivation, most of it in the provinces of Punjab and Sindh. Investments would be made in surface irrigation, in a network of roads and railways, and in the development of the port of Karachi. These investments paid off handsomely and turned the wastelands of Punjab and Sindh into the granaries of British India. For decades, the Indians were spared the scourge of famines. The last famine to hit the country was in 1943 but, as the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen was to point out in his seminal work on that particular tragedy, the cause was not a failure of food supply but the inability of the affected population to buy it. The Malthusian fear continued to influence economic thinking until the early 1970s. In fact in 1974, at the World Food Conference held in Rome, there was a widespread apprehension that that moment had arrived. That did not happen since about that time, new food growing technologies became available to increase the world's output. Pakistan was one of the countries to benefit from this development. The first "green revolution" based on high yielding seed technologies took hold in the country in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Between 1966 and 1976, output of wheat more than doubled, increasing from 3.9 million tons to 8.2 tons. This was equivalent to a rate of growth of 7.7 per cent a year, two and a half times the rate of increase in population. For rice the growth rate in the same period was a little lower, at 6.7 per cent a year but still very impressive. Rice production increased from 1.3 million tons to 2.5 million tons. While Pakistan and other populous countries with rapidly increasing populations may have escaped famines, population growth in many ways became a severe burden. One way of highlighting the damage caused by that burden is to speculate on the outcome of a somewhat slower rate of population growth, say one percentage point less than the actual rate of increase. In the case of Pakistan, population grew at the rate of 2.75 per cent a year to increase from less than 32 million in 1947 to 152 million in 2004. In 2004, Pakistan's revised GDP was estimated at $96 billion, which meant an income per capita of $632. Had the population increased at the rate of 1.7 per cent a year, by 2004 it would have been about 84 million. If the GDP had remained the same, income per capita could have been $1143. That would have been 80 per cent higher than the level reached in 2004. A one percentage point lower rate of growth in population would have pushed Pakistan into the ranks of middle income countries in the first few years of the 21st century, with per capita income higher than that of China. However, the relationship between population and economic growth is more complicated than suggested by this simple arithmetic. Economists believe that population increase is one of the determinants of an economy's rate of growth since extra hands generally mean more output. Looked at this way, population need not be a burden; it becomes a burden when the additional hand it makes available is not able to produce the amount of expected output. This happens when human development does not keep pace with population growth. This was certainly the case in Pakistan. One reason why the country has done so poorly in terms of developing its vast human resource is that it did not have the wherewithal to commit for education and health. A large and young population that does not have the education and training to enter the various sectors of the modern economy creates frustration, unhappiness, antagonism and ultimately leads to anti-social behaviour. Such a population can become - in many cases it did become - the recruiting ground for extremist groups. In a way, therefore, Pakistan was to become an epicentre for Islamic extremism in part because of the rapid increase in its population. There is also a direct correspondence between the rate of population growth and the incidence of poverty. Demography can keep the poor trapped in poverty in several different ways. For a variety of reasons, poor families have higher rates of fertility than those located higher up in the income distribution scale. It takes education to recognize the economic advantage of small families. The poor are generally not educated or poorly educated and tend to have larger families. When families are large, children tend to be closely spaced and this affects the health of the mother and also, with her inability to give enough time to her numerous children, the health of the entire family. Large poor families are usually beset with serious health problems. When families are large, mothers tend to turn to their daughters for help with household chores, including the care of younger members of the family. This makes it difficult for poor parents to educate their daughters; they cannot be spared from work in the house to go to school. This leads to illiteracy among women. Poor uneducated women have larger families and the link between high fertility rates and poverty continues to move along a vicious cycle. Persistent high rates of population increase have kept the rate of economic growth relatively low, the incidence of poverty high, and the level of human development much below than what is expected of a country at Pakistan's stage of development. It will take much more than simple acceleration in the rate of increase in GDP growth to break this cycle. But without a concerted effort to improve people's well being, the poor and the deprived in Pakistan will continue to be attracted towards extremist movements. Last edited by tarek : 09-28-2004 at 11:48 AM.

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