demography.matters.blog

The subject of COVID-19, a virus that burst forth from its rom obscurity in (most likely) one population or another of wild mammals in China to become a global zoonotic pandemic, is well-suited for Demography Matters. Speaking for myself, I have felt unable to address this topic because it is so all-encompassing. It has transformed my life and those of my friends and family, it has wrought remarkable change throughhout the world, and it will inflict a shock with consequences that we are only beginning to realize.

Thirteen thousand people have died of COVID-19 in Canada as I write, and to my country's south well over 300 thousand have died in the United States, with a total of 1.6 million recorded deaths worldwide. This is not the least of it: Over at Quora, Franklin Veaux answering the question of just how a disease with a mortality rate of 1% could paralyze the United States. Even ignoring the terrible mortality that it inflicts, COVID-19 leaves many of its survivors with a host of disabilities.

Vaccines cannot come quickly enough. What will the world be like when an unprecedented global distribution of vaccines is finished, when COVID-19 becomes just another disease that we can handle? (I am struck, as a long-time student of HIV/AIDS, by the prominence of Dr. Anthony Fauci in the American and global efforts to deal with COVID-19; his new prominent appearance in the fight to deal yet another plague shows how history can rhyme strangely.) Mortality and long-term health of populations will be affected, but they will not be alone. Early signs are that the great instability and uncertainty wrought by COVID-19 has helped depressed fertility worldwide, for instance, while cross-border migration has been tamped down almost entirely. The future evolution of the world population has been marked in a way that is not going to disappear quickly.

Demography Matters will be there for it. This blog may stay on Blogger or go elsewhere (Medium looks interesting), but there remains a real need for blogs which take a look at population issues. Demography does indeed matter. Watch this space.

Hurricane season this year in the Caribbean is shaping up to be terrible. I had not quite realized how terrible, the imagery of devastation aside, until I learned that the devastation wrought by Hurricane Irma had forced the evacuation of Barbuda, smaller of the two major islands which make up the country of Antigua and Barbuda. The island has been emptied of its population of some eighteen hundred people, breaking a centuries-long history of continuous habitation.

"The damage is complete," Ronald Sanders, the Antigua and Barbuda ambassador to the United States, told Public Radio International. "It's a humanitarian disaster."

"For the first time in 300 years, there's not a single living person on the island of Barbuda -- a civilization that has existed in that island for close to, over 300 years has now been extinguished."

[. . .]

When the storm hit, Antigua received minimal damage but the storm obliterated Barbuda's infrastructure, flattening structure after structure. At least one death was reported. Rescuers evacuated residents to Antigua and a state of emergency has been declared.

"We've tried to make living accommodations as good as humanly possible in these circumstances. Fortunately, we had planned ahead for this hurricane, and we had ordered supplies in from Miami and the United States before the hurricane hit," Sanders told PRI.

He told CNN about 1,700 people were evacuated from Barbuda to Antigua and said others went to Antigua on their own.

The living conditions aren't perfect and they can be "cramped," he said. But the evacuees are safe and the young people from Barbuda will be going to school in Antigua, for the time being.

"It's government facilities in which they are being located. We've opened some others. We've taken a nursing home for instance and converted that into accommodation and Antiguans have been very generous in opening their homes to some of the Barbudans, particularly those with young children," he told PRI.

The government believes that while some Barbudans might choose to stay in Antigua even after their island is rebuilt, many will want to go home.

NBC reports that apparently some hope revenues from online gambling sites based in the island nation could finance reconstruction.

Other islands have not faced such utter catastrophe, but are not far from there. As Jordyn Holman noted for Bloomberg, the US Virgin Islands' fragile tourism-based economy has been wrecked entirely by Irma. Without any way to sustain themselves, many inhabitants are already leaving.

Many local residents are giving up and getting out after losing everything to the category 5 storm, even as the local authorities in the U.S. territory say they are determined to rebuild the islands.

"I have no job, I have no house, I have no money," said Miriam Martinez, who works as a housekeeper and chef on St. John. "I can’t stay here."

The US Coast Guard arrived Tuesday to help transport evacuees and some tourists off the island. Many people are heading to San Juan, Puerto Rico, for medical care, or to reunite with their families and find out where they can go next. Martinez waited on the dock for hours to see her daughter, son and two grandchildren off as she planned to stay another month on the island. She couldn’t afford to leave herself.

Many of the islands’ 100,000 population have come from the U.S. and are now going back to their families on the mainland, said Ian Samuel, a volunteer and resident of St. John, who was helping evacuees this week. Some are comparing Irma to Hurricane Hugo in 1989, which cost the territory about $3.6 billion.

"Our main staple as an economy is tourism and we want folks from the wider U.S. community or the market to visit the U.S. Virgin Islands on a regular basis," the US Virgin Islands Governor Kenneth Mapp said. "We don’t want to be wiped off the list” of tourist destinations.

The New York Times reported similar levels of devastation on the island of St. Martin, divided between France and the Netherlands. The news from across the Caribbean has been grim, with reports coming in of thorough devastation from points as widely separated as Dominica and the Florida Keys. More recently, this evening I have learned that Puerto Rico just hit by Hurricane Maria, may not have electric power running for months.

Is the intensity of this hurricane season a consequence of climate change? Maybe. If it is, there's something of an irony in the fact that it is the islands of the Caribbean, the place that saw the first extension of imperialism beyond Europe--the extra-continental expansion that resulted in, eventually, our globalized industrial age--that it is the place that is starting to get hit most visibly by the negative environmental consequences of this globalized industrialism. The consequences for the peoples of the Caribbean will be severe. Where will they go? When will they be forced to go, in search of viable lives if not in an effort to save their lives?

Some days ago, I saw shared on Facebook an essay, Max Roser's "A history of global living conditions in 5 charts" at the Our World in Data project. In this essay, Roser makes the argument--contrary to the zeigeist of 2016--that, in fact, in the longue durée things have been getting decidedly better for people. Extreme poverty and premature mortality have faded, rates of literacy and education have risen, and both living standards and levels of political freedom have increased hugely. (Fertility rates, Roser has noticed, have fallen markedly worldwide as a result of these trends' conjunction.) Towards the end of this, Roser created a chart exploring just how radically things have changed.



The shift has been marked. Back in December 2010, I wrote about the demographic dynamics of the Roman Empire and other pre-modern polities, noting after Vaclav Smil that there are no modern equivalents to the terrible suffering of the past anywhere on our world now. Even central Africa, probably the least developed area of the world, is better off. More, as Roser notes, the dynamics to date are positive: rates of premature mortality and undereducation are falling, for instance.

Why is there unfounded pessimism about the world's future prospects? Roser suggests that the answer can be found in our failure to adequately understand the significance of long-running trends.

One reason why the media focusses on things that go wrong is that the media focusses on single events and single events are often bad – look at the news: plane crashes, terrorism attacks, natural disasters, election outcomes that we are not happy with. Positive developments on the other hand often happen very slowly and never make the headlines in the event-obsessed media.

The result of a media – and education system – that fails to present quantitative information on long-run developments is that the huge majority of people is completely ignorant about global development. Even the decline of global extreme poverty – by any standard one of the most important developments in our lifetime – is only known by a small fraction of the population of the UK (10%) or the US (5%). In both country’s the majority of people think that the share living in extreme poverty has increased. Two thirds in the US even think the share in extreme poverty has ‘almost doubled’. When we are ignorant about global development it is not surprising that few think that the world is getting better.

The only way to tell a history of everyone is to use statistics, only then can we hope to get an overview over the lives of the 22 billion people that lived in the last 200 years. The developments that these statistics reveal transform our global living conditions – slowly but steadily. They are reported in this online publication – Our World in Data – that my team and I have been building over the last years. We see it as a resource to show these long-term developments and thereby complement the information in the news that focus on events.

The difficulty for telling the history of how everyone’s lives changed over the last 200 years is that you cannot pick single stories. Stories about individual people are much more engaging – our minds like these stories – but they cannot be representative for how the world has changed. To achieve a representation of how the world has changed at large you have to tell many, many stories all at once; and that is statistics.

Individual stories matter, but statistical trends like these also merited tracking. Let's try to do them both this coming year, here at Demography Matters and elsewhere.

On Thursday the 21st in The Globe and Mail, journalist Konrad Yakabuski had an article published, "Fewer economic miracles in a world with fewer demographic explosions". Drawing particularly on Ruchir Sharma's March/April 2016 Foreign Affairs article "The Demographics of Stagnation".

Ruchir Sharma, the head of emerging markets and global macro at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, warns that policy-makers have been looking in all the wrong places to explain what has become the weakest global economic recovery in postwar history. The causes aren’t high public and private indebtedness, income inequality or overcautious investors, although those factors don’t help. The real problem is a dramatic slowdown in labour market growth rates around the world.

It seems counterintuitive to be worrying about labour market shortages when automation is rendering more and more jobs redundant and unemployment remains at near-record levels in most of Europe. Even the U.S. unemployment rate, which is at an eight-year low of 4.9 per cent, cannot mask the fact that the participation rate (the percentage of working-age Americans in the labour force) is at a four-decade low, leaving millions of potential workers idling on the sidelines.

But by exhaustively tracking population and gross domestic product growth over one-decade periods since 1960, Mr. Sharma comes to a several sobering conclusions. One is that “explosions in the number of workers deserve a great deal of credit for economic miracles.” Another, he writes in an article published this week in Foreign Affairs, is that “a world with fewer fast-growing working-age populations will experience fewer economic miracles.”

Between 1960 and 2005, the expansion of the labour force and rising productivity determined growth rates almost everywhere. During that 45-year period, the global labour force grew at an average annual rate of 1.8 per cent. Since 2005, the rate has slipped to 1.1 per cent and is expected to fall further in all but a few outlying nations (such as Nigeria) as the consequences of a decades-long decline in fertility rates leave even emerging economies facing dwindling influxes of new workers.

[. . .]

“Over the next five years, the working-age population growth rate will likely dip below the 2-per-cent threshold in all the major emerging economies,” Mr. Sharma says. “In Brazil, India, Indonesia and Mexico, it is expected to fall to 1.5 per cent or less. And in China, Poland, Russia and Thailand, the working-age population is expected to shrink.” The most worrying slowdown is China’s, with “dire” implications for the rest of the world. In the past five years, Mr. Sharma notes, China alone accounted for a third of global growth.

This is the sort of scenario that long-time readers of Demography Matters have been forewarned about for some time, thanks to the insights of dear comrade Edward Hugh. The 21st century will be a world, it seems, where human capital, in relative abundance or otherwise, will play a critical role in determining the futures of world economies. Individuals, groups, entire communities or countries relatively well-positioned might well be strong. I suspect that in the coming decades, people with the right skills will prosper. Other regions, though? I can easily see any number of major economies not adapting well. Can Germany, locomotive of the Eurozone, really outlast sustained low fertility? What of China? What of ... ? One can only hope that the robots will come on stream at the right time.

When I saw the title of Sandrine Rastello's Bloomberg article "India to Emerge As Winner from Asia’s Shrinking Labor Force", I initially expected some naive demographic boosterism, some argument to the effect that India's young population will ensure it of future economic triumphs. Happily, this article was one where the title does not match the subject.

By 2050, the Asia Pacific region will have nearly 50 percent of the world’s total work force, down from 62 percent today, according to Bloomberg analysis of United Nations data.

The shifting patterns will see India account for 18.8 percent of the global work force compared with 17.8 percent today, toppling China from the top spot. China will account for 13 percent, down from 20.9 percent now.

[. . .]

India's super sized labor force is often referred to as its demographic dividend, a key asset on its way to achieving economic superpower status. But there's a lot of catching up to do: its per person income is just a fifth of China's.

One obvious problem for India will be finding jobs for such a large populace. Employment data in Asia's third-largest economy is sketchy but the little we have suggests the labor market is far from vibrant.

A survey of selected companies including those in the leather, car and transportation sectors show employment growth fell to 64,000 new jobs in the first three months of the year from 117,000 in the previous quarter, and 158,000 before that. Not exactly what you would expect for an economy growing at 7 percent.

India also suffers from a skills shortage. About 5 percent of workers have formal skills training, compared with 96 percent in South Korea. Central bank Governor Raghuram Rajan called India's human capital his main medium-term concern.

This is something I've noted here before: In August 2012 I noted this in relation to the United States that might not capitalize on its demographic advantages over other high-income countries, in passing in a January 2013 comparison of high-fertility France with low-fertility Germany, and in January of this year when I compared China with Southeast Asia. Crude demographics is but a single starting point. They are not at all by themselves able to determine everything about the future. In the case of France and Germany, for instance, despite dire demographics Germany has moved notably ahead of France in the past decade. Why might China, even if it has an aging population, manage the same trick versus at least some of its potential rivals?

Over at my blog, I asked my readers what they thought about the Syrian refugee crisis. This is a week to ask people what they think of this, after all: Between photos of dead children and reports of Germans welcoming refugees by the trainload, the issue has been getting a lot of press this week.

If I was to make any predictions about where this would all end up, I would be willing to commit to the statement that, in coming decades, Syria is going to become one of those countries to which millions of people around the world--millions more, I should say--trace their ancestries. Given the unpleasantness of the Assad regime and the Islamic State and the devastations associated with civil war, there are going to be very good reasons for Syrians to want to leave their homeland for some time to come. They may be neighbours, like Turkey and Lebanon; they may be in the same hemisphere, like Germany or Sweden; they may be on the other side of the planet, even.

I would also be willing to commit to the argument that few of these refugees will return. They will have had very good reasons to leave Syria, and there is little reason to think conditions in their homeland will improve enough to attract more than a few people. One thing we have found from refugee displacements in the past two decades is that, unless displaced refugees return quickly, they will be displaced. Depopulation can be permanent, even when the fighting has stopped.

Beyond that, I'm reluctant to make any predictions. Do I think that the plight of Syrian refugees will improve significantly, perhaps on the model of what happened to the boat people of Indochina? Maybe. Do I think this might lead to lasting global changes, for good or for ill? I am skeptical.

What do you think the end results of all this will be?

Over on my blog this evening, I noted that Philippines I based fast food chain Jollibee was set to open its first Canadian location later this year in Toronto. Apparently part of the chain's plans for global exchange expansion, with more locations slated to open up in the United States, Europe, Japan, and the Middle East, the Toronto restaurant is being created as part of a diaspora events red strategy. instead of competing head-on with established chains, for the foreseeable future Jollibee in Canada--and elsewhere?--will be targeting communities with larger Filipino populations. Already familiar with the chain, the thinking seems to be that these communities will hopefully serve as the base for future growth.

This strategy makes sense to me. Is Jollibee's expansion globally based on a similar strategy? If so, I wonder if a South Korea with its own rapidly growing ties with the Philippines might also be targeted. One strategy common to many immigrant groups around the world, as they grow in number and start to become business owners s, is to specialize in food. To the best of my knowledge, Jollibee is unique in being a fast food chain. Are there comparable cases elsewhere in the world that I am missing? I am quite curious. I also wonder if, given likely future growth in Filipino-originating communities around the world, Jollibee might be a good investment.

Last Monday at the American libertarian blog The Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin made a post announcing his support for the thesis of the Open Borders NGO that migration should be as unhindered as possible. Linking to various authors' arguments in favour of this thesis, Somin makes the argument that the tendency worldwide should be not to raise barriers to migration but to lower them.

As the Open Borders Manifesto notes, and as I have said in the past, most open borders advocates do not claim that the right to free migration is absolute and always trumps opposing considerations. Just as I reject absolute property rights or absolute freedom of speech, so too I reject absolute rights to free migration. But we do believe there should be a strong presumption in favor of free migration that can only be overcome by strong evidence that restriction is the only way to prevent a harm great enough to outweigh the vast benefits of freedom to natives and migrants alike.

Many of the commenters at the Volokh Conspiracy are unconvinced, arguing that the author underestimates the costs involved. I myself am undecided about the thesis: There do seem to be great potential gains in GDP globally if there was a freer global market in labour alongside other global markets, but I'm also quite aware that there could be significant political costs if these associated migrations ever became problematic.

What do you, readers of Demography Matters, think of the argument?

Back on the night of the 4th of October, I joined thousands of Torontonians in wandering the streets late at night, looking at some of the works of art put out for public display in the all-night art festival of Nuit Blanche. One of the works I found most evocative was an installation mounted by Montréal-based artist Maria Ezcurra, draped on an alleyway on Spadina Alley in Toronto's oldest oldest Chinatown. The installation's title? Made in China.

The installation is composed of clothes labeled “Made in China,” donated by the community and set in a Chinatown alleyway. This collaborative piece functions as a façade filling an empty space between two buildings, creating in this way both a physical and a symbolic connection among cultures.

The work is about connections between Eastern and Western societies, between old customs and current trends, between globalization and tradition. It is about how we see and understand ourselves from other views, and vice versa. But mostly, it is about trying to build a bridge in which we are all represented, as a society as much as individuals.

Made in China is an anthropology of our shared present. Clothing in this project is perceived as an effective artistic medium for knowing and learning in new ways about ourselves in relation to others, thus symbolically connecting individual knowledge with culturally produced ideas.

Two months later the news came out that once again, China now had the world's largest economy, at least measured by purchasing power power and in aggregate. China, as Joseph Stiglitz noted in Vanity Fair, is sufficiently large and sufficiently rich to be #1 again, and a major force in the world.

China is also facing the prspect of rapid population aging. Feng Wang 2012 analysis for the China Economic Quarterly, "Racing Towards the Precipice". Between a shift to low levels of fertility and rapid increases in life expectancy, China's working-age population can be expected to start contracting just as its population of potential retirees is growing. Multiple sources predict the working-age population will peak in just a couple of years. This sort of rapid aging could impose very serious costs on China. Ultimately, it could lead to China not completing its economic convergence towards the high-income societies of the world.

Will this necessarily mean that societies with more advantageous age structured, especially neighbouring ones, will profit? That potential certainly does exist, for instance in Southeast Asia. This International Business Times article sets the tone of that argument.

Home to 600 million people and located next to the growth engines of China and India, countries comprising the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) economies face the challenge of creating enough jobs to absorb their domestic growing labor forces and building infrastructure to boost productivity, according to an HSBC economist.

“We believe the future, at least from a demographic and natural resource perspective, belongs to ASEAN,” HSBC economist Trinh Nguyen said in a research note. “But whether this will be realized will be dependent on the will of the countries’ leaders.”

Although seen as the new frontier for growth, these Southeast Asian countries still performed below their potential, averaging just 5 percent growth in the past decade. The region attracted $111.4 billion in foreign investment last year -- almost equal to China’s $121.1 billion. But Nguyen thinks ASEAN countries can and should do better.

In the coming decades, ASEAN nations will have more prime-age adults (age 25-54) than ever before, and their dependency ratio (the proportion of the young and aged to working age adults) will drop significantly, freeing up resources for other investment opportunities, according to HSBC. Economic behavior varies at different stages of life -- while the young require investment in education and health, and the aged require health care and pensions, prime-age working adults supply labor and savings.

Emphasis should be placed on "potential." William Pesek's Bloomberg View commentary from last month, "When Even $7 Trillion Isn't Enough", notes that despite generally more advantageous age structured Southeast Asian countries aren't necessarily in the position to benefit.

For all the handwringing over rising labor costs on the mainland, China's annual output per manufacturing worker remains a staggering 15 times greater than Vietnam's ($57,100 versus $3,800), four times Indonesia's and more than three times that of Filipinos. Bottom line: Higher wages may not drive as many foreign manufacturers out of China and into Southeast Asia as some have predicted. Why relocate southward only to get less for your money?

Given all the hype about regional integration next year, those numbers should be sobering. On Jan. 1, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations will take its most dramatic step yet toward creating a Europe-like common market for 600 million people. McKinsey reckons that a better-integrated Asean could generate as much as $615 billion in fresh economic value annually by 2030. But it will take many years and considerable political will to unify 10 disparate economies that often compete more than they cooperate, and the progress won't necessarily be linear.

Infrastructure is, of course, vitally important to making Southeast Asia more efficient. As Tonby points out, Asean would be well served by "overcoming some of the fragmentation that has prevented companies, technologies, and services from achieving scale in the past."

But human development -- including aggressive investment in education, training and healthcare -- could be even more critical. Take Indonesia. Southeast Asia's biggest economy often touts its demographic dividend -- 26 percent of its 250 million people are under 15 -- but that's a strength only if Jakarta gives them the tools to compete. "We often brag about how much cheaper we are in terms of labor vis-a-vis that of China and vis-a-vis other parts of the world, but we tend to overlook the fact that we're not as marginally productive as China," says Gita Wirjawan, Indonesia's former trade minister. "We've got to do something about building the soft infrastructure for the purpose of creating a much more marginally productive society."

The same is true in Thailand -- where an inefficient and underfunded education system continues to hold down productivity -- as well as Myanmar, Vietnam, the Philippines and elsewhere. Even as they map out new highways and railroad tracks, Asean governments need to increase investment in education exponentially. As of 2012, for example, Indonesia was spending 3.6 percent of gross domestic product on education, while Malaysia spends 5.9 percent and Thailand 7.6 percent. Those ratios need to be closer to 20 percent in the years ahead.

Going something further afield, Dhiraj Nayyar's "Making 'Make in India' Work", also for Bloomberg View, makes the argument that things are even worse in China's trans-Himalayan neighbour.

Consider land. A new land-acquisition law, passed in the dying months of the previous government in 2013, makes buying farmland on which to build factories tremendously complicated and expensive; by law, companies have to pay four times the market price in rural areas. There's simply no free market for land in India.

On labor, India should have a cost advantage over China, whose labor-intensive goods now flood the Indian market. Chinese wages have risen rapidly over three decades of double-digit growth. India’s haven’t, and almost half the population is still engaged in unproductive agriculture. Yet tough labor laws mean that the opportunity costs of hiring workers remain cripplingly high. While the government has started a debate on reforming those laws, few changes are evident yet.

Unreliable and expensive power supplies hamper all of India's businesses. Indian governments have long subsidized agriculture and regular consumers by charging higher rates to industry. China and other emerging nations have followed the opposite strategy. India need not reverse course completely, but it needs at least to even out prices for everyone while boosting overall supply.

The issue of expensive capital is one that should particularly exercise Rajan. He knows that India’s closed financial system artificially raises the cost of capital. He's stuck with a tight monetary policy for the moment because of high inflation. But compared to the rest of the world, Indian interest rates tend to be too high even when monetary policy is more accommodative. There's also plenty more room for India to open up its financial system, even if it remains wary of the kind of cowboy capitalism that led to the 2008 crash.

As numerous sources note--for instance, the OECD report "Economic Outlook for Southeast Asia, China and India 2014: Beyond the Middle-Income Trap" (PDF format)--moving beyond the middle-income stage countries need to innovate to move ahead. Simply having large numbers of workers will not guarantee economic growth if other elements of economic policy aren't sufficiently adept. China, notwithstanding its documented problems and likely prospects, has so far been making a better job of its particular age structure than its neighbours have. Will they catch up? (Will China slow down even further?) All that remains to be seen.

This sort of thing shouldn't need to be emphasized. Look, for instance, at central Europe, where despite advantageous geography and high levels of human development bad policy kept central Europe from catching up with northwestern Europe in the fashion of southern Europe, and where now population aging may mean central Europe might never completely catch up. Demographics, alone, is not destiny. There are things that can be done to make the most of it; there are things that can be done to do otherwise. Simple statistics, by themselves and without interpretation, do not necessarily mean that much.

One of the most prominent individuals in the Canadian news cycle right now is Lin Jun, a 33 year old Chinese student in computer science at Montréal's Concordia University who was brutally murdered late last month by a Toronto-born ne'er-do-well. The especially graphic and gratuitous nature of Lin's murder and Magnotta's long history of Internet-mediated cruelties has gotten a lot of attention, as has a thankfully brief moral panic concerning the existence of a film of the murder. One theme that hasn't been neglected in the media coverage is an examination of the murder victim, a man who chose to immigrate to Québec for educational reasons as much as personal or economic reasons: Lin was one of more than twenty thousand international students in Québec, one of nearly one hundred thousand international students in Canada.

Education-driven international migration is an increasingly notable phenomenon worldwide. As populous emerging economic powers--notably China and India but also new entrants like Brazil--develop economically, newly wealthy middle and upper classes have the income and the desire necessary to take advantage of programs of higher education. In many cases, domestic educational institutions are lacking, whether in capacity or in prestige, leaving many aspirant students to look for education abroad. Receiving countries like Canada, meanwhile, eagerly take advantage of international students as sources of additional income in this era of funding cutbacks, charging fees that are many times higher than those charged to Canadian citizens as described by Canadian magazine MacLean's back in 2010.

Lise de Montbrun was a teenager in Trinidad when Canadian university recruiters descended on her high school. Armed with pamphlets and descriptions of Canadian campus life, they wooed de Montbrun and others to come study up north. “I didn’t need much convincing,” said de Montbrun, now a 22-year-old architecture student at Toronto’s Ryerson University. It seems more young people around the world are thinking the same way.

Lucrative international students are flocking to Canada in record numbers–almost doubling in the last decade–as universities woo them to bolster their shrinking budgets. The number of international students in Canada has ballooned from 97,300 in 1999 to just over 178,000 in 2008. One-quarter of those students are in Ontario while the majority settle in large cities like Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

Canada drew de Montbrun from the very beginning. Since Trinidad didn’t offer architecture programs, de Montbrun knew she would have to study abroad. Now, she said she’s earning a degree which is internationally valued, all the while being exposed to a different country and culture. But, she’s paying for it. Since most provinces deregulated tuition fees, post-secondary institutions can charge international students more than three times the fees Canadian students pay. In de Montbrun’s first year, she was paying $14,000 in tuition. Now, her annual bill is closer to $17,000.

“Every year, it increases,” she said. “The university can increase it at any rate they want.”

My alma mater, the University of Prince Edward Island, is generally more moderate; international students in the undergraduate programs merely pay twice what Canadian students pay, while students at the Atlantic Veterinary College pay more than four times what Canadian students pay (just over twelve thousand Canadian dollars for a Canadian student, just under fifty-five thousand Canadian dollars for an international student).

Kathryn McMullen and Angelo Elias' February 2011 report for Statistics Canada, "A Changing Portrait of International Students in Canadian Universities", describes international student migration in the Canadian context. The past decade has seen rapid growth in absolute numbers across Canada, with the early predominance of Ontario and Québec as destinations for international students fading as traditionally more peripheral provinces increase their shares, too, while the proportion of students entering higher graduate programs has fallen and science and business programs continue to attract the bulk of student attention.

In 1992, international students accounted for about 4% of all students enrolled in Canadian universities. That share fell very slightly in the mid-1990s before showing steady growth through to the mid-2000s. By 2008, the share of international students had doubled compared to 1992, reaching 8% of all university students in Canada. These changes are the result of an increase in the overall number of international students at Canadian universities from 36,822 in 1992 to 87,798 in 2008.

The gains in the shares of international students have not been even across provinces. Notably large increases are evident in New Brunswick, which saw the percentage of international students rise from among the lowest in 1992, at 3%, to one of the highest in 2008, at 11.4%. International students also accounted for a relatively large share of university students in 2008 in British Columbia, Nova Scotia and Manitoba, at 10.6% and 9.3% and 9.2%, respectively. Strong gains in the shares of percentages of international students are also evident over this period in Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia.

It should be noted that, in some provinces, even though the share of international students showed relatively large increases, their overall numbers remained comparatively small. For example, in New Brunswick, the number of international students rose from 747 in 1992 to 2,616 in 2008. Also, large increases in the number of international students can be masked by large increases in the total number of students. In British Columbia, for instance, the number of international students rose from 3,858 in 1992 to 16,662 in 2008, while over the same period, the total number of students rose from 66,171 to 156,741.

[. . .]

This shift toward a greater proportion of international students enrolling in a first degree program is masked by the overall numbers of students at the undergraduate level. For example, in 1992, international students accounted for 3.1% of students enrolled at the bachelor's level, Canada-wide; by 2008, this percentage had risen to 6.6%. International students continue to account for a much larger – though declining – share of students at the doctorate level, at 24.9% of students in 1992 and 20.6% in 2008. Relatively little change is evident at the master's level, with the share of international students being 10.5% in 1992 and 12.8% in 2008.

International student populations are, for many institutions of higher education, not only sources of economic capital through their tuition rates but of cultural capital, too, as the selection of an institution by a sizable number of students from abroad can be prestigious. The United States has traditionally been the dominant destination for international student migrants, but post-September 11th visa restrictions and the impact of the post-2008 financial recession has led to a diversion of students, first to other English-speaking countries and then elsewhere. (Recent discussion in Ontario of scholarships directed towards international students reflected continuing controversy over the subject, while international student numbers in the United Kingdom are intimately connected to that country's immigration controversies.) Taiwan (vis-a-vis China, here), Australia (vis-a-vis India), Japan and Poland, and Germany have all expressed interest in acquiring international student populations. As the controversy in the United Kingdom indicates, international students are often welcome only as temporary migrants, foreign students seeking to extend their stay in their new countries of residence often being unwelcome. (There's some speculation that international students might provide the human capital necessary to encourage the elaboration of transnational economic ties, for instance between Brazil and Massachusetts in the wake of the new Brazilian international scholarship program.)

What of Canada and Chinese international students now? The murder of Lin Jin, coming a year after the murder of another Chinese student in Toronto a year ago, may have put many Chinese off Canada.

“I heard of the murder of friend’s relative in Canada before, now there is this other case ... can people go to this place?” wrote one Internet user from central Henan province, in reply to the Canadian Embassy statement. The author was one of many who raised questions over how safe Canada really is, a worry that could pose a particular threat to Canadian universities, which were already in damage-control mode in China in the wake of Ms. Liu’s murder.

“The impact of the case will be very bad on Canada,” Meng Xiaochao, the boyfriend who witnessed the attack on Ms. Liu, said in an interview. “Last year when Liu Qian’s case happened, many parents said they were no longer willing to send their children to Canada. Now here comes this other case.”

More than 50,000 Chinese students currently live and study in Canada. Like all foreign students, they pay higher tuition than their Canadian-born classmates, making them highly sought-after by cash-strapped universities. Another 242,000 Chinese came to Canada as tourists last year, a number the travel industry had been hoping would increase by as much as one-fifth this year.

Hamilton’s Mohawk College was concerned enough about the impact the case could have on its bottom line that it intervened in the debate on the Canadian Embassy page with a Chinese-language posting that pleaded “please believe [us], Canada is a country with good public security protection. Canadians are very friendly. This individual case is not big enough to influence the trust between people of China and Canada… [it’s a] country worth of the trust of foreign students and parents.”

For the sake of Canadian institutions of higher education, if nothing else, here's hoping that this is a just a brief phase.

My response to World AIDS Day on Friday was a post at my blog reacting to the new book by doctor and Université de Sherbrooke professor Jacques Pepin, The Origins of AIDS. This book is a detailed examination of the origin of AIDS, piecing together the chain of events that allowed HIV to transition from minor zoonotic transfer that killed only a relatively few chimpanzee hunters and their intimates to being a global pandemic with tens of millions of dead and infected.

The mechanics behind the transfer of HIV from chimpanzee hosts to humans infected by blood during hunting and butchery are simple enough, while modern surveillance of the epidemic from the early 1980s on gives us a knowledge of how the disease is transmitted into new populations, how it takes hold and how it can be stopped. But how did HIV manage to make the transition from minor zoonosis to aspirant global epidemic?

Pepin argues that HIV wouldn't have seeded a global pandemic had it not been for a perfect storm of events occurring under colonial rule in Central Africa, of which two of the most important are the widespread use of unsterilized hypodermic needles to (among other things) inoculate French colonial subjects against local pandemics and patterns of urban migration in the Kinshasa-Brazzaville conurbation that encouraged the growth of a sex trade suited to accelerating the virus' spread. (For Pepin's purposes, "central Africa" comprises several discrete groups of territories: French Equatorial Africa, a federation of four colonies later countries (Gabon, Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Chad), the French Cameroons that began as a German colony, later became a French mandate under the League of Nations, and eventually dominated; the Belgian Congo produced by the 1908 nationalization of the Congo Free State founded by royal génocidaire Léopold II on his own initiative; and, the non-Francophone anomaly of Equatorial Guinea, at one point the only Spanish holdings in sub-Saharan Africa.)

Pepin's book is all about populations, not only how they die and grow sick but how they live and structure their lives in very challenging situations. A few of the points that Pepin made struck me as worth sharing with Demography Matters' readership.

1. The relatively small populations of central Africa compared to central Africa's colonizers

One thing that jumped out at me when I opened Pépin's book was the ratio between the populations of colonized central Africa and its European colonizers. Central Africa was very sparsely populated.

While the quality of historical demographic data in central Africa is not very high at all, it is fair to suggest that for every person living in central Africa in the 1920s, perhaps four people lived in France and Belgium. The ratio was particularly low in French Equatorial Africa, a region of some two million square kilometres that was estimated in the late 19th century to have had a population of some five million people, more recent estimates suggesting a population that may have been half that. The former German colony of Cameroon had a population somewhere between two and three million people. Even the Belgian Congo, a veritable "subcontinent" as Pépin called it, in the 1920s had a population roughly the same size as its Belgian colonizer of seven or eight million people.

The difference in terms of population densities was vaster still, since central Africa's land area of some 4.7 million square kilometres is eight times the 582 thousand square kilometres of metropolitan France and Belgium combined. Central African populations, well into the lifetimes of many of the people reading this post, were small and (on average) widely dispersed.

Things have changed hugely. Now in 2011, central Africa has approximately twice the population of its colonizing region in Europe, and this ratio of central African population to Franco-Belgian is certain to continue to increase sharply to the relative advantage of the former region. I don't think it's at all speculative to suggest that this change in population ratios has much to do with the end of the French and Belgian empires in this vast area, since imperialism over a vast territory is easier if there isn't a vast population living on it that might contest the imperium's claims.

2. The vulnerability of central African populations to external forces

The small size and very low density of central African populations before the 20th century, and their very rapid growth after that point reflects the terrible vulnerability of populations in the region to outside forces.

Slavery had a hugely negative impact on the region, whether the transatlantic slavery of the European trade directed towards the New World or the Arab trade directed towards northern Africa and the Indian Ocean. Pépin cites estimates that eight hundred thousand slaves may have been taken by European slavers from the central African areas of his study; he doesn't provide estimates for the numbers taken by African slavers. This massive forced migration, sustained over centuries, had demographic impacts apart from the direct one of people leaving their lands of birth. The long-term effects of the central African slave trade included the destruction of much of the human and social capital necessary for the formation and maintenance of large-scale trading networks and polities, this in turn limiting the carrying capacity of central Africa relative to other world regions. The Kingdom of Kongo was destabilized over the long term by the export of people via the Portuguese based in neighbouring Angola and São Tomé and Príncipe.

The formation of European colonial empires in central Africa was also associated with terrible mortality. Much of this mortality was intentional, most famously in the Congo Free State where in the space of a generation the population shrunk by perhaps half from twenty to ten million, produced by a combination of very elevated death rates caused by mass killings, overwork, and their second-tier consequences (famine, disease, migration) and the lowered birth rates of potential parents who opted not to become parents in a country that amounted to an open-air extermination camp. A similarly sharp population decline also occurred in French Equatorial Africa as a result of the region's conquest and its sequelae.

To the best of my knowledge, central Africa is one of the few areas of the world in the modern era where populations consistently declined. Empire can be blamed for this.

3. The vulnerability of central African populations to disease

In my post last December on the dire demographics of the Roman Empire (and by extension, all pre-modern cultures), I followed Vaclav Smil in his identification of central Africa as the closest contemporary proxy for the Roman Empire's high birth rates and almost equally high death rates. In the early 21st century, such an analogy is somewhat strained, since although the region's health indicators--life expectancy, maternal mortality, and the like--lag world norms considerably they've considerably in advance of pre-modern standards.

A century ago? Not so much. Even now, Sub-Saharan Africa generally suffers from a higher burden of endemic disease than other low-income world regions, this substantially a consequence of sub-Saharan African environments. Consistently high temperatures and humidity support the mosquitos that sustain malaria, for instance. What one source identifies as "neglected tropical diseases", a broad collection of parasitical and protozoan diseases generally not present elsewhere in the world or not present to the same degree, seriously hinder the health and economic development of the region's peoples. Central Africa, a region that then as now had comparatively little developed health infrastructure, is and was especially vulnerable.

Tsetse fly-borne trypanosomiasis was the biggest threat to central African populations. Becoming especially widespread in central Africa over the 19th century following the intensified migrations and trade associated with colonial conquest, trypanosomiasis seems to have threatened the depopulation of large regions, with outside observers claiming that the populations of some regions like lowland Uganda or parts of the Congo basin were halved by the parasitic disease.

In Pepin's account, the French responded to this existential threat to the populations by establishing a fairly thorough compulsory medical program relying heavily on the use of hypodermic needles as delivery mechanisms for medicines. Most unfortunately, the hypodermic needles used were not sterilized, the idea of viral contamination of syringes only becoming known in central Africa until after the Second World War. This, Pepin suggests, may have been the thing that took HIV from being a rare zoonotic infection of chimpanzee hunters to being a plague with the potential for far wider spread. In his 2010 paper "Iatrogenic Transmission of Human T Cell Lymphotropic Virus Type 1 and Hepatitis C Virus through Parenteral Treatment and Chemoprophylaxis of Sleeping Sickness in Colonial Equatorial Africa", Pepin's study of a population in the Central African Republic that had received treatment for trypanosomiasis more than sixty years previously revealed that only a small fraction of the people who had been treated and expected to survive to the present actually did: "From historical data, we predicted that 59% of Mbimous 65 years and older would report treatment for trypanosomiasis before 1951; only 11% did so." Why? Noting that the rapid progression of human beings from infection with HIV to death in the space of a single decade made his hypothesis impossible to confirm, Pepin noted that use of unsterilized needles in the region was quite common--"In 1917–1919, of 89,743 individuals screened in Oubangui-Chair (now Central African Republic), 5347 were diagnosed as having trypanosomiasis and treated (mostly with subcutaneous drugs) using only 6 syringes."--and that other viruses known to be transmitted via the same routes as HIV, including Hepatitis C and HTLV-1, were present among the survivors.

HIV may have started as a zoonosis, but Pepin argues that it's only the widespread use of needles in the medical campaigns of France that allowed the rapid transmission of the virus beyond the relatively enclosed networks of kinship that once would have contained the virus. HIV could plausibly have been transmitted to very large numbers of people, some of whom who eventually would make their way to the cities of central Africa.

4. The role of unbalanced sex ratios, specifically, and anti-family sentiments generally, in the amplification of STDs

Central African cities are generally young, often founded as outposts by European colonizers and only seeing rapid growth after the Second World War, when rural-to-urban migration (only sometimes triggered by humanitarian catastrophes) and economic growth made urban life more appealing. In the case of central African cities, rural-to-urban migration was something undertaken mainly by men, as economic actors who (unlike women) had the autonomy as individuals necessary to move. Particularly in the Belgian Congo, migration by women was restricted in a vain effort to prevent the formation of families in urban areas and the entrenchment of urban living as a viable alternative. (This Belgian policy might be best considered as one of a clutch of policies, including the limitations on higher education of Congolese subjects, aimed at keeping the colony firmly under the control of the metropole.)

With the populations of Central African cities being composed disproportionately of young men with active sexual appetites, the unbalanced sex ratio created an opportunity for women to establish lucrative careers as sex workers. Pepin identifies numerous different trends in the sex trade, everything from women who had stable and lucrative relationships with a limited number of people to less fortunate women who exchanged sex anonymously with large numbers of people for pittances. As the economy of independent Congo deteriorated over the 1960s, the latter practice became more common. The formation of large open-ended sexual networks created a perfect environment for HIV's rapid spread. It didn't help that, as Pepin notes, Belgian medical policy in the future Kinshasa for STDs made full use of the coercive power of the state to provide medical treatment for anyone possibly infected with a STD, even the many people infected with yaws and thus providing a false positive for syphillis tests, and that the main medical centre also used unsterilized needles.

It's not a coincidence at all that this model of rural-to-urban migration, encouraging the migration of working-age men to urban centres but discouraging the migration of women and children to same in the hope of limiting permanent urban settlement, is exactly the same model of rural-to-urban migration instituted in southern Africa under apartheid that led to the current stratospheric rates of HIV prevalence throughout the wider region. Belgium echoed South Africa's sustained underinvestment in the human capital of its non-white subjects, and AIDS reaped the benefits.

5. The potential novelty and superficiality of migration-related links

(This principle applies to viruses and human beings alike.)

We could, if we really wanted, blame the HIV/AIDS epidemic outside of sub-Saharan African on la francophonie. After Belgium's hasty withdrawal from the Congo, in the 1960s the country was left without the trained professionals necessary to run the Congolese state. In order to fill the gap while Congo's own higher education system came online, the United Nations recruited thousands of French-speaking Haitian professionals and their dependents, fleeing the dictatorship of Duvalier. Many stayed; some few were infected with HIV; one unfortunate Haitian brought the virus back to his homeland sometime around 1966, as shown by the 2007 research of research of Worobey et al.. From Haiti, HIV made its way to the United States in 1969 and eventually seeded the epidemic in the North Atlantic world that led to the disease's recognition in the developed world a decade, perhaps, after it had become a major killer in central Africa. In the early 1980s in North America, in fact, AIDS was strongly associated in the popular imagination with Haitians, who formed a disproportionate number of the first diagnosed AIDS cases, especially in Québec and Florida where the Haitian immigrant diaspora was most visible. (Randy Shilts' book on the early epidemic, And the Band Played On, quotes a bathhouse owner in Florida who went so far as to say that AIDS was nothing gays in Florida had to be concerned with.)

How did all this happen? The chance historical events that established central Africa as a collection of territories run by Francophone powers, the ill fortune in Haiti that made emigration--not only to obvious destinations in the North Atlantic world, but even to remote central Africa--a good life choice, and the shared use of French in both the sending and the receiving country. Yes, as Paul Farmer noted in his generally quite good take on the Haitian AIDS epidemic, AIDS and Accusation, neither Haiti nor Congo (then Zaire) are as Francophone as France (as France now, at least; Eugen Weber's 19th century France was quite different), but neither had to be. In Haiti, French remained a socially more prestigious and internationally useful language than Haitian Creole; in Congo, a very complex language situation with four regional languages of note and official standing dozens of local languages did give French a privileged position as an official language. That shared language made Haiti and Congo appear in the perspective of the other.

The shape of the modern AIDS epidemic was chance, at many levels. The unfortunate Haitian who seems to have transferred the virus out of Africa might not have been infected, or might have died without transmitting the virus further. In that case, the transmission of HIV outside of Africa could have been delayed by decades, and by the 21st century AIDS would be seen as an overwhelmngly African disease, with the chance associations of the epidemic with gay men and Haitians not coming up. Conceivably, differences in colonial policy towards urbanization and public health, or maybe heightened concern for the possibility of medical contamination, could have slowed down or even aborted the epidemic. If different colonial powers had been active--perhaps the Portuguese, building on the long history connecting between the Portuguese and their Angolan colony with Congo--then even if the same sorts of things that caused the AIDS epidemic occurred it would have progressed in different directions. (Angola and Brazil are both quite lucky to have avoided the large epidemics often predicted for them, and the misuse of improperly sterilized hypodermic needles in Guinea-Bissau under Portuguese rule does seem to have unleashed HIV-2, the less lethal and much rarer variant of HIV, on the world.) Ubangi Shari --> Kinshasa --> Port au Prince --> New York City was not an inevitable trajectory for AIDS, nor was the size or shape of the epidemic to date.

I'm fond of statistics; I'm equally fond of innovative presentation of statistics. That's why I owe LiveJournal's centralasian thanks for linking to this clip from The Joy of Stats, a recent BBC show hosted by Swedish doctor and statistician Hans Rosling. The clip's title? "200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes."



If you want to fast-forward through, the presentation proper starts at 0:31 and a compressed version starting at 3:52.

In it, Rosling shows quite graphically how the world began to shift from a demographc regime not that far removed from the high fertility/high mortality pattern experienced in the Roman Empire and in other traditional societies, Greater Europe with its industrialization proceeding while Asia and African stayed behind, with peak inequality occurring after the Second World War. It's at that point that the rest of the world began to converge with the developed world, first in health terms then in income. His suggestion that improved technology and increasing globalization will see this convergence continue--perhaps at least in demographic terms, if not economic--seems plausible on the face of it.

For more innovative statistical presentations on matters demographic, I highly recommend Rosling's Gapminder site. Go, peruse.

The recent shelling of South Korea's Yongpyeong island by North Korean-South has obviously been quite disturbing. It likely won't come to war, notwithstanding being the most substantial confrontation between the Koreas since the armistice. If it did come to war ... Anatoly Karlin's scenario for a second Korean war does have an eventual South Korean-US victory over the North, but one coming at the cost of hundreds of thousands of casualties--military and civilian, mostly North but also South and American. The economic costs, both directly to the Koreans and indirectly to the wider world, almost don't stand thinking about.

One of the most worrying things about North Korea's military threat to the South lies in the fact that Seoul--the historical capital of Korea, and a metropolitan area home to half of South Korea's 50 million people--is within range of North Korean artillery. Although--as Karlin notes--growing military superiority may allow for successful preemptive strikes, and despite ongoing efforts to build sufficient shelters for Seoul's population, the city is obviously at risk. Close to the 38th parallel that inspired the post-1953 DMZ, Seoul's prosperity is fragile.

Over at Lawyers, Guns and Money, Charli Carpenter put forward a proposal by one Robert Kelly to diminish South Korea's vulnerability to the North by decentralizing the country, moving population from the northwest of the country to the southern areas.

The various criticisms of this plan--that it would be very expensive, that it would take a long time to make any noticeable shift in the distribution of South Korean population, that it would be illiberal, that it would be a waste of money once reunification/regime change came, that it would be illiberal, that expecting South Korea to move its capital from Seoul would be as plausible as expecting France to move its capital to Lille or Lyon, and that given South Korea's small size it's not obvious that even a partially successful decentralization would make much difference--all stand. The first comment is the one I like best.

Cities are built on geography and human inertia. What starts as trade routes and resource-rich regions result in the financial, government and service structures to support those primary industries. That’s what causes the influx of immigrants, the concentration of wealth, and eventually the self-sustaining nature of the city.

Cities don’t die unless that fundamental geographic economic advantage disappears. While there might be ways of encouraging growth in the south, there won’t be a fundamental shift of population without a regional economic incentive.

Moving the government buildings from one spot to another might shift a population, but only a small portion of it. Only 16 US state capitals are located in the largest city of the state, after all.

The commenters, it should be noted, did agree that inasmuch as state policies discouraged investment and development outside Seoul, these policies should be changed to favour the growth of the second tier of South Korean cities.

This sort of sentiment isn't new. The idea of decentralizing population and industry in a centralized country was most prominent in France, where geographer Jean-François Gravier coined the phrase "Paris and the French desert" to describe the dominance of Paris over the rest of France. Owing to early declines in birth rates, and perhaps also the concentration of immigrants in Paris (and other cities), many regions of France saw their populations stagnate and decline, while Paris become ever-more powerful in a centralized republic. After the Second World War, systematic government planning did aimed to promote decentralization.

Industrialisation in France was based, as in other countries, on coalfields. The black countries in the North, Lorraine and Massif Central were the first centres of the steel, chemical and textile industries. But the second phase of industrialisation was of greater advantage to Paris, as major industries, such as cars, aircraft, engineering and electrical goods, began operations in and near the city. In one hundred years, the population of the capital, which was already 2 million at the end of the 19th century, grew fivefold.

[. . .]

The planning body, DATAR, was set up in the early years of the Fifth Republic (1963). Its work is centralising by nature, but its effects have been contradictory. At first, the division between Paris and the “provinces” (a condescending term, now replaced by “regions”) was accentuated. Paris, the centre of politics, the economy, research and culture is also the hub of infrastructure networks. The web of roads and railways was strengthened by new forms of transport: motorways, high-speed TGV trains and airports.

Furthermore, industrial policy in the Gaullist period focused on aerospace and the nuclear and electronic sectors for reasons both military and civilian. This planned industrial policy, based on nationalised industries, was the origin of what are now called new technologies. But the new technologies were located in the Paris region, where they had all the elements required for their development: grandes écoles, universities, CNRS and the military-industrial complex.

This process of concentrating highly qualified employment in metropolitan areas was extended to other cities. Those that already had an industrial, university and technological basis, such as Grenoble, Toulouse and Bordeaux, benefited from the establishment of aerospace industry, nuclear and electronic research centres and became science cities. Other regional cities created science parks, such as Montpellier, Lyon, Nancy, Metz, Rennes, Nantes, Lille, Nice and Marseille. Publicly funded science research was more evenly spread across the country and privately funded research set up closer to universities.

The net effect may have been to decentralize France, to allow second tier cities to emerge as niche competitors to Paris. French efforts to decentralize the country, however, had two negative effects.

First, as Bernard Marchand wrote in his September 2010 essay "The concept of "territory" in French planning: An essay in dialectical analysis", French planning not only aimed to support regional centres, but to support rural territories which possessed unviable economies at the expense of urban and suburban areas which desperately needed attention and government investment, what he called an overemphasis of territory over households.

Secondly, trying to diminish Paris risked harming Paris' status as a world city. In a very real sense, Paris' competitors aren't Lille and Lyons, but rather London and New York City. Depriving Paris to boost the second tier of French cities would harm Paris' rank in this clasisfication, and, by extension, France itself.

The same problems would apply to Seoul and South Korea. Indeed, Paris and Seoul are classified by one author as "macrocephalic" cities, places where geography and governance and economics and population have concentrated to produce one urban centre that completely dominates the rest of the country. (Vienna and Budapest, former imperial capitals now the metropolises of much smaller rump states, and a Bangkok more developed by far than the Thai countryside, also fall into this category.) Sociology Danny Dorling's 2008 paper "London and the English Desert: The grain of truth in a stereotype" argues that Greater London is starting to acquire a similar position of dominance in England. Other cities--Tokyo-Yokohama in Japan, Buenos Aires in Argentina, perhaps, Johannesburg in South Africa, or Baghdad in Iraq--might be in similar positions.

Is it in the interest of the South Koreans to decentralize their population so radically? Military vulnerability aside, it doesn't seem to be the case. Regardless of what policies have encouraged Seoul to become so dominant in South Korea's urban hierarchy, and the legitimacy of these policies (the decisions of military dictators to concentrate everything in the national capital comes to mind), Seoul is now what it is. Trying to take the metropolis apart--as opposed to trying to promote growth in other major urban centres, and perhaps using high-speed commuter connections to functionally fuse more cities in South Korea with the capital--would involve massive and expensive population shifts, to say nothing of the strong possibility that there might not be many places to hide in a compact South Korea. It would certainly hurt Seoulites efforts to promote Seoul as a world city.

South Korea's population is caught in an unenviable situation, living in a thriving city that's at risk of devastation. In this respect, Seoul might not be unlike the cities of the Cold War world, which regardless of their ideological affiliations were vulnerable to annihilation in the space of a half-hour at most. I can only hope that the experts are right when they say that an escalation to war is unlikely, and that the Koreas--even North Korea, however unlikely it may be--will be as lucky as the rest of the world was.