At first glance, it might seem that the UK and China have the opposite problem when it comes to population. Latest projections suggest the British population could grow by almost 10 million over the next 25 years. Conversely, the Chinese government announced it would be dropping its controversial one-child policy, amid fears that if current trends continue, China could see its population decline substantially over the long term.
However, to see the UK and China as facing mirror-image dilemmas illustrates how misleading raw population numbers can be. Population structure is a more meaningful measure of a developing nation’s demographic health. In this respect, like many other developed countries, the UK and China face the same issue: an aging population.
There is a reason why this demographic phenomenon tends to follow industrialization. As countries start to develop, death rates fall as public health improves, while birth rates remain high, leading to rapid population growth. However, as countries develop further, birth rates also fall, leaving a population bulge.
The biggest difference between the British and Chinese predicaments is that China got there much faster, thanks to its incredible growth rates and the introduction of the one-child policy in 1980 at a time when rapid population growth was thought to be an impediment to economic growth.
The issues that come with an aging population are well rehearsed: growing pressures to spend more on pensions and healthcare, which, taken together, account for by far the biggest chunk of government spending, but, all else being equal, a lower per-capita tax base. One way of mitigating the costs of an aging population is for people to work longer; hence, the state pension age is set to rise to 70 by the 2060s. However, this slow increase is nowhere near enough to compensate for an aging population and it has unequal impacts — working longer is more difficult for someone whose job involves manual labor.
Another way is to increase government tax revenues via population growth in the working-age population. Those who oppose it say this is unpalatable because Britain is reaching capacity. Yet this is far from true: Most people think more than 50 percent of England is built upon, but the actual figure is actually more like 2.3 percent, when parks and green spaces are excluded. Education and health services do not have a fixed capacity; as they have done in recent decades, they can expand as the working-age population increases as a result of an increasing tax base.
That is not to say there are not issues: In areas of London and the southeast, transport infrastructure is already stretched and housing is in short supply. However, this is more a failure of housing and regional growth policy rather than population policy: Successive governments have failed to build enough houses and local areas have not been given enough freedom to attract investment and boost growth.
Population growth is a function of three factors: birth rates, death rates and net migration. The reason why last week’s UK population projections have been so controversial is because much of the growth in the working-age population is accounted for by immigration.
Immigration makes the failure of public services, transport and housing to keep pace with rising demand more visible, as people can see people who look different to them using local services and infrastructure. This has particularly been a problem where there is poor planning for growing demand for services: The role of local authorities in planning for school places has gradually been eroded in the context of increasing numbers of academies and free schools; when services are being cut back anyway as a result of austerity; and when the government is failing to deliver on housing.
Yet migrants contribute more than they take out: Those arriving in Britain between 2001 and 2011 are estimated to have contributed £5 billion (US$7.7 billion) net to the public finances. Immigration, therefore, works to offset some of the fiscal problems of an aging population. Take it out of the equation, and the effects are stark: Office for Budget Responsibility projections suggest that were net migration zero, the debt to GDP ratio would be 40 percent higher.
Of course, immigration has consequences for integration and identity. Growing ethnic diversity has been much more successful in some places than others. London, by far the most culturally diverse part of the country, is often characterized as a tolerant melting pot of ethnicities and faiths, now home to the country’s best state schools — partly a result of that diversity. However, in other areas of the country, such as Burnley and Oldham, a lack of integration has caused significant problems for race relations as government policy, shaped by multicultural liberalism, failed to foresee the issues with different ethnic communities leading parallel lives.
The political response has been shameful: to stoke up people’s reasonable fears about immigration, perpetuating the myth that immigrants are taking a fixed number of jobs or a fixed number of school places. The right response would be to take people’s concerns about stretched services and infrastructure more seriously: build more houses and reinject local government with the power to plan for school places, as well as do much more to promote integration between different communities.
Population policy is a misnomer: Population growth is impossible to predict, let alone control. In the 1960s, before birth rates fell as a result of the contraceptive pill, forecasters thought the UK population would reach 80 million by 2000. The levers that might be used to try to shape birth rates are not only illiberal, but blunt.
The Chinese government has experimented with partially dropping the one-child policy before, but take-up has been very low, suggesting a policy like this shapes long-term cultural norms in ways that are impossible for governments to predict. There are areas of the developing world, yet to industrialize, where overpopulation as a result of high birth rates has real effects on welfare and poverty, but the only tried and tested way of bringing them down is through economic development.
In the UK, we should be grateful immigration can function as a safety valve to offset some of the costs of an aging population, while recognizing it might have negative as well as positive consequences for integration and identity. However, that would require a more informed and responsible political debate.
This is an editorial published by The Observer on Sunday.
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