Opinion The sweetest dividend
In global meetings,there is now concern on India and China changing the balance of power.
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In global meetings,there is now concern on India and China changing the balance of power. On one such occasion organised by the IMF and Bank Indonesia for Governors of Central Bank I was asked to look at the Goldman Sachs BRICs work particularly the ‘demographic dividend’.
When I dissected the econometrics behind it,it turned out that some dividends would accrue anyway like if the working population is growing faster than the total,per capita income grows faster. That is an algebraic truism and you cant go by falsisms. But most of the other dividends,less retirees/more savings and so on were dependent on social behaviour and policies and I concluded that dividends are not automatic as Chidambaram and Nilekani did more elegantly later. But my story today is a very attractive,but small part of this paradigm given the Women’s Reservation Bill and so on
There is in the Bloom and Williamson econometric model of the demographic dividend a particular advantage which I called the sweetest dividend. This was the assertion that with a fast growing younger population more women would come into the work force. This would be faster than the men. Now this is not intuitively transparent since the population of men and women would grow roughly at the same rate in spite of sex determination.
It happens on account of two reasons. First the first child is born later in a women’s life with girls marrying later and second,the last child is born earlier as couple’s limit their family size. So bingo,more women in the work place. It happened in China earlier but they were losing out on the demographic dividend futures since they forced birth rates down so now it was our turn.
I hate to be a killjoy,particularly on this one because I really loved the dream. But life it turned out was actually not as simple as the Goldman Sachs pipe dreams. In actual fact when we were growing slow in agriculture between 93/94 and 2000/01 comparable National Sample survey data showed that women’s employment in agriculture and particularly in crop production and milk production actually went down in a big way.
It recovered by 04/05 as the agricultural economy improved but generally it turned out as the economy spins down the lady gets the sack first. So we cant be a paternalistic world discriminate all along against women,between castes and between religions and then talk of goodies like the demographic dividend.
But if we change,if she is as important as he,and my neighbour has the same blood as I have,life can be sweet. The answer my friend as my favourite folk singer Joan Baez sang when I went to college in America,is blowing in the wind.
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