IN the 1960s President Ayub Khan made population growth a major policy concern for his development-minded administration. However, since then policymakers have not given the subject of population the attention it deserves.

That is unfortunate since the dynamics associated with population growth varies according to the location of people, the patterns of migration and differences among various areas. It has had a profound impact on the way the country has developed — and not just economically.

Demography has also had a profound impact on Pakistan's political and economic development. Today I will look at some of the broad trends in Pakistan over the past six decades, look at the way population trends are shaping globally, and see how these world trends relate to Pakistan.

When Pakistan became independent in 1947 its population was estimated at 32 million. Sixty-three years later it has increased 5.3 times to 170 million. This implies an average annual rate of growth of 2.74 per cent, one of the highest in the world. The government claims that the rate of increase has been declining in recent years and is now below two per cent, possibly no more than 1.8 per cent a year.

In 1947, only 10 per cent of the population lived in urban areas; today the figure is about 50 per cent. This means that the size of the urban population has increased 26.5 times, again one of the highest rates of growth — 5.4 per cent a year. About a third of the urban population resides in two large cities, Karachi and Lahore. As is the case with the rest of the developing world, the rate of increase in the populations of large cities in Pakistan will also decline while those of the secondary and tertiary cities will increase.

This brings me to the question of global trends. It is useful to reflect on these in order to comprehend the challenges Pakistan's policymakers face and will do so in the future as they begin to focus on the impact of demography.

The UN's population division now projects that world population growth will almost come to a standstill by 2050. At that time the global population will stabilise at 9.15 billion compared to the present 6.83 billion. This levelling in the rate of increase was not anticipated a couple of decades ago. In the 1980s, for instance, demographers worried about what they had begun to call the population bomb. The bomb did not explode in most parts of the developing world. That said, there is now a new worry — the distribution worldwide of the anticipated growth. The new generation of demographers has now begun to point to some population trends that could produce a great deal of economic, political and social instability.

Almost the entire growth in the world population of 2.32 billion will occur in the developing world. By the middle of this century the share of today's rich countries will decline to only 12 per cent of the total, five percentage points lower than was the case at the beginning of the century. It is not always recognised that this is a significant reversal of past tends. At the start of the 18th century, Europe accounted for 20 per cent of the world's population.

The advent of the industrial revolution in Britain resulted in an explosion of its population as health and sanitation facilities improved and the rates of mortality declined. In 1913, on the eve of the First World War, Europe had a population larger than that of China at that time. By that time the proportion of Europe in the context of the global population had increased to 33 per cent of the total. However, the continent was getting too crowded. There were serious food shortages in some parts; Ireland suffered what came to be known as the potato famine. In migration, the Europeans found a solution to their population problem. There was a massive movement of people to North America and Australia.

There will be other significant changes in the distribution of the population. Not only will today's developed countries have a significantly lower proportion of the total population, their populations will also be much older and the proportion of non-working to working populations will increase considerably. Will the burden of looking after older people fall mostly on the young or will the state step in to help? If it is the latter, how will the state pay for the care of the poor? These have already become important policy issues in developed countries.

By the middle of the century more than half the global population will live in towns and cities. Most of the increase in urban populations will take place in the large- and medium-sized cities in the developing world. Even at this time these cities are proving hard to manage. Neither they nor the states in which they are located have the means to provide some of the essential services people need. In many of them security is a major concern. Today some 90 per cent of global homicides are committed in the urban areas of the developing world.

There will also be significant demographic shifts within the developing world. Populations in Muslim countries will increase much more rapidly than in other parts. As Jack A. Goldstein says in his article, 'The new population bomb', in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs, “most of the world's expected population will increasingly be concentrated in today's poorest, youngest and most heavily Muslim countries which have lack of quality education, capital and employment opportunities”. He probably had Pakistan in mind when he wrote that sentence. But the option of migration is increasingly less available to the crowded Muslim world as was the case for the Europeans 100 years ago.

This then is the context in which we should look at our demographic situation. We are engaged in a race either develop the economy rapidly so that opportunities are created for the young or fumble with the economy and let the youth turn increasingly towards extremism.