TOPIC OF THE WEEK: Uzbekistan's fast growing population—a blessing or a curse?
About two years ago, spurred by William MacAskill’s “What We Owe The Future”, a book that focuses on long-termism and effective altruism, I tried to explore what the idea that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time might mean for the Caucasus and Central Asia (CCA). The underlying critical focus on human survival suggests that, if we want to be taken seriously as economists, we must delve more responsibly than ever into the intricacies of demographics. I then made a kind of coarse long-termist ranking of CCA economies, based on their demographic windows, that contradicted the more traditional (macro-based) ordering of these countries.
A recent piece of demographic data from Uzbekistan, which read that, in the early morning of August 28, the country's population hit 38mn has made me re-evaluate and re-do the exercise with the latest available statistics from UN's World Population Prospects. As it turns out, the 2022 edition of the Prospects (which I used at the time) was widely off with regard to when Uzbekistan's population would reach 38mn, with the baseline scenario forecasting 2030 and the high-variant scenario, which assumes a higher fertility rate, anticipating its taking place by early 2029. The latest edition of the Prospects, from 2024, saw that landmark number reached in 2027 both in the baseline and high-variant scenario (albeit earlier in the latter), although even this is now off by two years.
I have then asked two questions: Is there another CCA country with such significant revisions in population prospects? And if not, then what accounts for that? And, indeed, Uzbekistan was the only CCA economy where population projections differed meaningfully for just a relatively short 2-year span in providing forecasts for something that seems to be so long-term. More interestingly, my analysis suggests that, to a significant degree, this is due to the fact that Uzbekistan has been the fastest improver in Central Asia in terms of healthcare-related reforms even if it still lags Kazakhstan in absolute terms. This explains why Uzbekistan is now expected to have the highest birth rate and the lowest mortality rate in Central Asia (yes, even better than the much richer Kazakhstan) by the end of UN's forecast period.
Uzbekistan's demographics may thus be possibly characterized as a blessing to a long-termist economist and a curse to a traditional one.
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