Demographic Dividends across the Global South: A Comparison of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (1970–2020)

Abstract

The last half century has seen seismic transformations in the demographic outlook of many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Because these transformations have coincided with equally profound economic change, they raise questions about the role of demographic change and its dividends in transforming the developing world. For instance, how much have the differences in onset, patterns, and management of fertility transitions fueled the growing economic divergence now seen across these regions? On the one hand, the four Asian Tigers reportedly leveraged their fertility transition to accelerate economic growth. On the other hand, a few countries in West Africa have yet to initiate their fertility transition, and the list of least-developed nations is increasingly restricted to African and high-fertility nations. In this chapter, we use new decomposition methods to estimate the dividends accrued by individual countries between 1970 and 2020 and to explore how these dividends contributed to the region’s economic growth and differentiation. The analysis begins by estimating the size of each country’s dividend; then, we consider factors that explain differences across national dividends. Finally, we estimate the percent contribution of this variation in dividends in explaining the cross-country variation in the economic outlook of this world region.