Demographic Transition

Brad Delong links to another uber cool tool from Google.

In particular, the example is great for looking at the so called demographic transition - the link between per capita income growth and population growth. The initial configuration plots fertility versus per capita income for most of the worlds countries. You can set the graphs in motion to see how things have changed over the past 30 years. The tool also allows you to select individual countries and display their tracks. Very interesting cases are China, India, Mauritius, The Bahamas, Korea, Botswana, and Saudi Arabia.

I also like the fact that it pretty clearly seems to show my idea that low fertility precedes rather than follows economic growth. Almost every country with low fertility, however poor, seems to accelerate toward advanced country income levels.

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