évolution et devenir du peuplement mondial

Abstract

This paper emphasizes the considerable share taken by the developing countries, especially the Asian, African and Latin American populations, in the planetary demographic explosion observed during the 1950’s and 1960’s, whereas the “developed countries” (market economy) and the “socialist nations” remained immersed in a demographic decline, going back to several decades. But, strangely enough, a lot of observers and other experts continue to reason, nowadays, as if this explosion was still going on, when it is obviously in process of lull since about forty years. Indeed, since about 1970 or 1971, the world population’s growth remains very positive and important, but it is nevertheless going on according to a declining growth rhythm, essentially attributable to a spectacular cut of fecundity in numerous and vast areas of the developing world. All these facts enable us to think that a true demographic transition is, here and now, being realized in a big lot of developing nations (except Sub–Saharan Africa) and that during the last twenty years of the present century the world’s population will be probably becoming steady… Consequently, henceforth, the planetary demo-economic problematic must appreciably differ of the one which was anticipated during the 1950’s and 1960’s. Cutting strongly their death and birth rates, some developing countries are yet offering a population growing old, and it is likely that the bulk of these countries will be confronted, during the next decades, with this question (and with its train of economic and social outcomes in the fields of “labour force / population ratio”, health and social protection, retiring system, inter-generational solidarity…). By another way and in demo-economic words, if the demographic transition of the rich world has taken its roots in the economic development, we may think that, in the present developing world, the relationship which is predominating is rather “bi-univocal”, for more than 40 years : the efforts unfolded for overcoming the demographic explosion’s effects help to break the famous vicious circle “demographic growth / stagnation of GDP per capita”, and the economic progresses which arise from that sustain in their turn the achievement of the demographic transition.