Abstract
China’s Belt & Road (“B&R”) initiative has attracted much attention in recent years. Many studies have assessed the potential impacts of this initiative from the economic, political, foreign relations, and military perspectives. However, very little attention has been paid to examine the opportunities and challenges of this new initiative from a demographic perspective. Therefore, this study investigates into the population dynamics of 65 countries in the B&R region, and explores the demographic dynamics of this regional cooperation model. Based on graphic visualization, the demographic heterogeneities within the B&R region, in terms of current stages of demographic transitions, population age structure, and demographic windows of opportunities have been revealed. Furthermore, a model-based cluster analysis has been conducted to classify the B&R countries into two groups. One group consists of countries with younger population, low education access, and larger gender gap in the labor market, while the other group comprises of more aged population and has better performances in economic development, education enrolment, and female labor participation. The demographic windows of opportunities in the former group will remain open for the coming decades; whereas the windows have already closed or is about to close very soon in the latter group. The former group should take lessons from the latter concerning how to better prepare themselves for the demographic transition. Moreover, the curvilinear relationship between wealth and well-being has a complicated structure and the B&R initiative should focus not only on economic development but also on the human well-being.
Highlights
In September 2013, during his visit to Kazakhstan, President Xi of China put forward building up “the Silk Road Economic Belt” as a new regional cooperation development model, later in the same year in October, he again called for “the twenty-first Century Maritime Silk Road” in a speech to the Indonesian parliament (Swaine 2015)
The whole demographic transition has been classified into five stages: in the first stage, both fertility and mortality are very high, leading to a stable or slow increase of population; in the second stage, the population grows very rapidly, as fertility remains at a high level while the mortality starts to fall greatly; in the third stage, the population growth slows down, with fertility falling and mortality falling more slowly; in the fourth stage, the population size stabilizes again, with fertility and mortality remaining at very low level; and in the fifth stage, fertility continues to decline to a level even lower than mortality, the population size starts to decrease (Max and Esteban 2018)
In comparison to the five stages of the demographic transition in Fig. 8, it can be seen that about 13 countries in the Belt & Road (B&R) region are in the fifth stage, experiencing depopulation, and most of them are in Eastern Europe; half of the B&R countries are in the fourth stage, experiencing slow increase of population; and about 20 countries located in South Asia, Middle Asia, and Africa are in the third stage, with natural growth rates of 15 or above per 1000 persons
Summary
In September 2013, during his visit to Kazakhstan, President Xi of China put forward building up “the Silk Road Economic Belt” as a new regional cooperation development model, later in the same year in October, he again called for “the twenty-first Century Maritime Silk Road” in a speech to the Indonesian parliament (Swaine 2015). The two proposals have been officially named as the “Belt and Road Initiative” (hereinafter Belt and Road abbreviated as “B&R”) This B&R initiative is to break geographic limitations and strengthen an inclusive, balanced, and open relationship, covering five cooperation priorities- policy coordination, facilities connectivity, trade facilitation, financial cooperation, and people-to-people bonds (Huang 2016; Johnston 2016). The population dynamics in the B&R region are one of the essential factors which would determine the pace of economic prosperity and social development. This factor has not received the deserved attention. This research conducts a comprehensive investigation into this crucial factor, to examine (1) in what demographic dimensions the heterogeneities exist; (2) the potential challenges and opportunities; (3) how this initiative can benefit all the countries as well as the people living in the B&R region
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