Introduction & Session Notes. Opening Address. Plenary 1, 2, 3, 4. Panel Discussion 1A, 1B, 1C. Review & Preview. Plenary 5. Panel Discussion 2A. Session Notes, Population Change & Social Services. Panel Discussion 2B, 2C, 2D. Plenary 6. Panel Discussion 3A, 3B, 3C. Closing Address. |
PLENARY 3 - POPULATION CHANGE AND THE ROLE OF IMMIGRATION |
Population Studies Centre, University of Waikato AND PROFESSOR RICHARD BEDFORD, 2 - Population Dynamics 3 - Population Structure 4 - Population Policy: Issues 5 - References
SESSION NOTES,
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- 3.3.2 Prospective
The British journalist Martin Walker writing in the Guardian Weekly (Walker, 1996) about the American elections asserted that "Demography was at the heart of all the great issues..." A business analyst forecasting stock-sector trends in Barron's (Yamada, 1996) comments on the importance of "demographic influences". What is interesting about these assessments by lay commentators is the strength of their opinions and the fact that their detailed analyses relate to population structural changes, and refer to dynamics only by way of explanation of the compositional trends. They have captured the essence of the major emerging population issues, and have linked these to policy, in their case for politics and business.
As was noted above (Chapter Two), New Zealand's future is going to be driven more by compositional changes than by population growth. Above all, shifts in age- and cohort-structure can be reasonably well projected, at least for that component of the future populations born and already enumerated in one or more census. The changes will set the context for other macro-social changes, yet, except for concern about ageing, the insights they allow into the sort of society we might be in the first few decades of the new century are seldom drawn on.
New Zealand will eventually have an aged population, several decades into the 21st century. But even then, this effect will be less marked than in most other OECD countries (excluding Turkey), and also will be well below the OECD mean (including Turkey). In 2020, as is shown in Table 3.5, the percent of our population aged 65 years and over will be below OECD means, but will be above that for Iceland and Ireland, the only two western populations whose fertility exceeded replacement in the 1980s. For 2050, the OECD gives a far more speculative figure based primarily on assumptions about long-term fertility trends, plus migration, both of which properties we have shown earlier in this paper to be volatile. At that stage, New Zealand will be closer to the mean, which is affected by the inclusion of Turkey, but we will have a lower proportion at older ages than will 15 of the 23 western countries in that grouping.
Because of the disordered cohort effects noted earlier, ageing itself will not follow a simple trajectory. There will be shift-shares, backwards and forwards, between the younger and elderly and older elderly populations (65- 74 and 75+ years; Pool, 1997).
Table 3.5: New Zealand, OECD: Indices of Future Ageing New Zealand OECD Mean G-7 Mean Percent of Total 65+ Years 2020 15.3 17.9 18.9 2050 21.3 21.2 21.6 Total Dependency* 2020 50.0 54.1 55.8 2050 63.4 65.7 66.0 Aged Dependency# 2020 23.0 27.6 29.5 2050 34.8 35.1 35.9 Source: OECD, 1988, Tables 6, 13 and 14.
Notes : The OECD mean includes Turkey
G-7 = Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK, USA
* = [Population (0-14) + (65+)/Population 15-64] x 100
# = [Population 65+/Population 15-64] x 100In terms of dependency New Zealand will fall below both the G-7 and OECD averages. Total dependency is affected by both recent reproductive patterns and the process of population ageing, so gives a confused picture. Iceland and Ireland as well as Spain, which shifted dramatically from higher fertility than ours in the late 1970s to very low levels of sub-replacement, have lower rates of dependency than New Zealand's in 2020; only six of the western countries are below us in 2050. For aged dependency only Ireland and Iceland have lower levels than us in 2020, and in 2050 our levels are still below those of 16 of the 23 western OECD member-states. In 2051, it should be noted, total dependency (aged + child) will still be below the level we faced in the baby-boom (1961) (Pool, 1997).
Although Turkey has significantly lower levels of aged dependency in both 2020 and 2050, its total dependency rates are much closer to the OECD mean, a function of its higher fertility and youth dependency burden. Those New Zealand commentators who see procreation as the means of escaping ageing should ponder that point: increased levels of reproduction, unless turned on and off in a judicious fashion, would increase our dependency burdens further. It is of course still a moot point whether exchanges between the working population, and childhood and youth populations, which are increasingly dependent into their 20s, are more costly than those to the dependent elderly. The latter may have equity at their retirement, and, in any case, are not a homogeneous population, but have varying capacities in terms of contributions they might make to, or demands they might make on, the economy. At the same time, however, it is important to recognise that ageing implies not only bio-medical and economic demands, but also will have an impact on the cultural and social fabric of New Zealand society (ICPPG, 1990; these are documented for Europe, see van der Wijst and van Poppel, 1990)
Momentum growth from cohorts of fluctuating size, born in the 20th century and early 21st will hit key life cycle stages producing on-again/off-again demands for policy, services, goods needed at these life-cycle stages. The disordered cohort effect noted above will make far more difficult the planning and policy processes necessary to meet these demands.
This will be a critical issue within the older age groups themselves. We sometimes forget that the elderly are not a homogenous group socially or demographically. In 1996 there were 73 older elderly (aged 75+ years) for every 100 younger elderly (65-77 years); in 2021 it will still be 73 but by 2041 it will be 115, rising to 142 in 2051, then dropping to 123 in 2061 (Pool, 1997).
The focus on ageing in policy discussions directs attention away from other more pressing issues. The populations at workforce ages are at present growing, and in our case will continue to do so into the decade 2010-20 (OECD, 1988). That constitutes the good news; the bad news is that the New Zealand working age group will, in general, be ageing over this period. This overall trend, however, conceals a far more critical compositional change.
The baby-blip of the years around 1990 will produce a youth surplus (a growth in the proportion of the total population at ages 15-24 years; the term is the Central Intelligence Agency's) around 2010. Thus heavy demands will be placed on tertiary education and on the labour market. It will be undergoing changes beyond those which have already occurred, such as in terms of skill, age and gender profiles (Johnston, 1991), for full/part time participation, and in industrial patterns of labour demand by industry and occupation (Serow, 1981).
These demands will be exacerbated by the fact that this future surplus will follow a decade of youth deficits, which in turn come after the youth surpluses of the 1980s. As was noted earlier, the economy did not adequately serve the young during the last period of youth surplus, which came at the end of a period of monotonic growth in the youth population. One wonders, therefore, how sensitive policy will be to the relatively rapid alternation of years of surplus, with deficits, when there will be a temptation to cut programmes directed to this age-group, and then its capacity to turn back to meet new surpluses.
In fact, the key foreseeable factor of dependency derives from the baby blip. They are already producing fiscal burdens as they enter school -- a very large component of increased expenditure in the 1997 budget went to meet their needs. They will then reach the tertiary educational ages about 2010, creating further fiscal and other demands. In the meantime, the smaller birth cohorts now being born will mean that facilities created and persons trained to meet short term peak needs will have to be reassigned. By 2010 they will also be reaching the labour market.
The last time a cohort such as the baby-blippers reached the labour market (in the late 1980s), the labour force entrants bore the brunt of high levels of unemployment. Assuming, on the basis of our history of lack of planning, that we do the same the next time around we will have created two major problems: (i) we will have failed to assimilate these people fully into adult society and the economy and thus undermined the foundations needed if we are to meet the onset of ageing -- ie a fully employed, well qualified, high salary (and thus high tax) workforce to look after the baby-boomers in their old age; and (ii) we will have immediately to meet the welfare costs of unemployment thus diverting money from investment and savings to current expenditure.
Presumably, these same baby-blip cohorts will also marry/cohabit and have children, say from about 2015. Even if their fertility is low, the fact that there are more of them means that this will produce further fiscal burdens in areas such as maternal and paediatric health (the importance of which politically is evident in the 1997 budget) and education, right at the moment that we feel the first full-scale effects of ageing.
These New Zealand compositional changes produced by the baby blip must be put into perspective. On the one hand, along with the United States, we are one of the few countries to have gone through a baby-blip. Among the Neo-Europes, it was the United States and New Zealand whose fertility in the early 1990s was higher, by about ten percent in our case, This period-bound wave makes our analyses of change and all subsequent policy initiatives rather more complex. On the other hand, detailed work we are doing at the Centre across all European and Neo-European societies shows that the impacts of ageing will be less marked in New Zealand than in most developed countries. Indeed, even within the group of Australasia and North America on most indices covering dependency, proportions at older ages, relations between ageing and birth generation New Zealand falls at the bottom.
Often-neglected in concern over ageing is the fact that before this happens the population will go through a process of middle-ageing, as is already occurring. This will have major consequences for social policy, for business (Yamada, 1996) and for the economy (Pool, 1988). Moreover, this change is occurring at exactly the moment when new patterns of family formation -- delayed childbearing, and the extension of the parenting years, producing delays in reaching the empty-nest phase -- have emerged. The differences in the tempo of child-bearing from generation to generation underlying these shifts, will have profound effects on inter-generational exchanges between parents and dependent children, and between middle-aged adults and the elderly. This issue is too complex to be dealt with here (see Sceats, 1988).
A further challenge will come from ethnic diversification. The Maori population will be going through a much slower period of growth than that through which it has just passed (Pool 1991a), or than is perhaps generally believed. In contrast, migrant populations may well become a more important component of our society. This must be stated with caution for levels of migration fluctuate very markedly, and because it is not clear that New Zealand will retain all its migrant arrivals (Pool et al 1996). It also seems that Asian New Zealanders have low levels of fertility, and even the Pacific Island levels are declining.
Perhaps more importantly, there will be ethnic differences in changes in age composition. So far this has been charted only for Maori, in an analysis which showed that they will undergo even more severe, albeit delayed, shifts in the proportion of their population at youth ages than was true for Pakeha. At the same time they will face rapid momentum ageing. The number of Maori at ages 65+ will increase more than fourfold from 1991 to 2026, whereas this will be only two and one-half times for the total population. The capacity of Maori whanau to meet this challenge may be limited by the fact that the largest bulge in the Maori population, the group now entering early middle ages, are those cohorts which suffered exceedingly high levels of unemployment in the 1980s and early 1990s. Thus they will not have taken with them into their parenting years the equity many middle-aged families will have achieved. These Maori families will also have had their children at younger ages than is the case for their Pakeha peers, thus increasing their burdens early in adulthood and reducing their capacity to generate equity (Pool, 1991a; Jackson & Pool, 1996).
In sum, not only will population composition play an important role in our future, but this role will be very complex. Yet up until now, with the virtual exception of ageing, these variables have not been factored into analyses of macro-social change and thus into social policy. Finally, it should be noted that these demographic structural shifts are temporally associated with other macro-social contextual factors.
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4
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POPULATION POLICY: ISSUES
- 4.1 Key Issues of Recent and Future Population Change: Developed Countries
Many developed countries, among them New Zealand, and even an increasing number of developing countries are facing three sets of demographically driven problems:
- 1.
- stationarity (when births equal deaths) or even negative
rates of natural increase and growth, accompanied by sub-replacement
fertility (when couples have on average fewer than about 2.1 babies);
- 2.
- a succession of age structural changes, the effects
of what disordered cohorts, the highest profile example being ageing,
which is merely one manifestation of this trend;
- 3.
- complex patterns of international mobility and internal
population redistribution. New Zealand and these other societies are
also confronted with two further issues which are partly demographic
in genesis, partly social and economic:
- 4.
- shifts in nuptiality (patterns of marriage, divorce,
cohabitation, etc), in family formation (nuptiality, plus the timing,
spacing and limitation of births, when children leave home, etc etc)
and in family structures;
- 5.
- labour force transformations relating to demographic
aspects of supply (the varying size of cohorts reaching labour force
ages), to employment status (employed/unemployed; full-time/part-time)
and to shift-shares between industries.
4.1.1 New Zealand's Future
For a sustained and sustainable demographic future we need fertility to be about replacement (Total Fertility rate, TFR = 2.1 births/couple on average). Let us be clear about that overriding objective. The problem is not identifying this figure, but rather what might de done, if anything, to achieve this delicate balance. As we will show, in a democracy there is little that can be done directly or even indirectly to alter population trends, let alone patterns already set in place.
Ideally, the TFR must not be much higher than 2.1, as that would create intolerable child dependency burdens at the very time that we are faced with heavy age dependency burdens. To add to this, for couples to achieve these higher levels high proportions of the women would need to be outside the paid labour force for significant proportions of their working lives, at exactly the time that the demographic burden of dependents on the labour force would reach increased levels.
Calls by some pronatalist groups for a return say to the higher rates of the early 1970s (TFR = 2.7) ignore these crucial points. In fact, because of the sequencing of fertility lows and highs starting at the end of the 1920s and ending in the baby-blip around 1990 that we have described earlier, we will have a slight taste of the effects of higher fertility. We cannot avoid the pressures that will be felt about 2020 and again about 2050 as baby-blippers and then their children reproduce. Even if the baby-blippers have few children on average, there are sufficiently large numbers of them born about 1990 that this will increase the size of the cohorts to which they will give birth.
Nor can we afford the TFR to be much lower than 2.1, as the working age population will be too small to sustain the dependent population, whether old or young. Many public comments on this issue are also stunningly simplistic. On can cite, for example, the argument recently by an environmentalist lobbying group that "if more (NZ) couples took the step of not having children, or at least stopping at one or two, our population growth would end sooner and the total begin to drop slowly" (Sage, 1997). This is not only oblivious to the fact that this is what is happening already -- our problem is to get New Zealand couples to have two children -- but totally ignores the other consequences of very low levels of sub-replacement fertility. On present evidence relating to reproduction in New Zealand and in other OECD countries overseas, particularly the Mediterranean countries (Italy and Spain) the problem will be to assure exact replacement (McDonald, 1997). Equally well, as we will show migration will not, as it were, fill the gap. It is not the simple panacea that some observers seem to think it is.
Several of the issues noted above are manifest and widely debated: ageing, international migration and ethnic structure, and to a lesser degree internal redistribution and sub-replacement fertility. But other more general questions of population age composition, which have major implications for a wide range of sectors and for fiscal policy, are latent and do not receive attention in the media, or from politicians and policy makers.
- 4.1 Key Issues of Recent and Future Population Change: Developed Countries
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