Back to home page1993 - VOLUME 48, NUMBER 1
93.13.03 - English - Abdel R. OMRAN and Farzaneh ROUDI
The Middle East Population Puzzle
The Middle East's diverse and rapidly growing population - 265 million in 1993 - has a history of high fertility and mortality. The region is undergoing a transition from high to low fertility and mortality, but the pace and level of change varies tremendously among the countries, between urban and rural population, and among different ethnic groups. Use of family planning is generally low in the region, but has increased in recent decades in some of the most populous countries - Egypt, Turkey and Iran. Demography, along with political and economic factors, has helped make the Middle East the site of massive labour and refugee movements. The movement between labour-surplus and labour-deficit countries within the region, combined with substantial Asian labour immigration to the Gulf countries, has altered the population structures of a number of Middle Eastern countries. Improvements in women's education, population policies to slow fertility, and political developments will help determine the future demography of the Middle East, but the momentum created by past fertility and the current age structure suggests that the region will have close to 500 million inhabitants by 2025. (WESTERN ASIA, DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION, MIGRATION, POPULATION PROJECTIONS)
OCTOBER 1993 - VOLUME 48, NUMBER 2
93.13.04 - English - David E. BLOOM and Adi BRENDER
Labor and the Emerging World Economy
The world's economic have become more integrated in recent decades, primarily because of improved communications technologies and relaxed barries to international trade and capital transfers. International labour migration accounts for little, if any, of the economic integration that has occurred since 1950. Economic integration is believed to enhance the well-being of the countries involved. Integration has been associated with sharp declines in income inequality among industrial countries since the 1960s. However, integration has proceeded slowly among the developing countries. Furthermore, the income gap between the developed and developing countries has increased. Even though population growth rates have leveled off in many countries, the number of people of working age will increase from 3 to 5 billion between 1990 and 2025, with over 90% of the increase occurring in developing countries. The large increase in the developing economies' share of the world labour force projected for the next few decades (from 75% to over 80%) will magnify the incentives for further integration between developed and developing economies. Such integration should promote increases in the world's income per capita. (DEVELOPED COUNTRIES, DEVELOPING COUNTRIES, WORLD, ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, MANPOWER INCREASE, POPULATION PROJECTIONS)
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