The demographic dividend is

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, Working population of 15 to 59 years. The demographic dividend is the growth advantage a country gets when the share of people of working age rises above the share of dependants, so answering it means knowing where the working-age band is drawn — and here two conventions are in play, both legitimate. India's own official statistics, including the Economic Survey, the Census and the NSSO/Periodic Labour Force Survey, routinely treat 15–59 as the working-age group, and this key follows that domestic convention. The international convention, used by the United Nations, UNFPA and the World Bank, draws the same band at 15–64: UNFPA defines the demographic dividend as the growth potential arising when the share of the working-age population aged 15 to 64 exceeds the non-working-age share. Neither figure is wrong; they are different national and international statistical practices, and this paper is not the place to adjudicate between them. What settles the question is that 15–64 is not on offer at all — of the four printed options only (b) names anything resembling a working-age band, and the other three name a mis-drawn band, the elderly, or infants. Note also that the stem is loosely worded: strictly the dividend is the economic opportunity created by the age-structure shift, not the working-age population itself.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Neither boundary corresponds to any statistical convention. Indian labour-force statistics count from age 15, not 14, and no definition of the demographic dividend closes the working-age band at 50 — that would discard a full decade of working life at the upper end. The option is built to look plausible by sitting one year below and nine years short of the real band.  (c) This is the dependent elderly cohort, not the working-age group, and a rising share of it produces the opposite of a dividend. When the over-60 population grows faster than the working-age population the old-age dependency ratio rises and the demographic window begins to close — the position Japan and much of Europe are already in and which India will reach in later decades.  (d) The 0–6 group is the child population that the Census reports separately — it is the base of the child sex ratio — and it belongs to the numerator of the young-dependency ratio, the exact opposite of the working-age group. A country with an unusually large 0–6 cohort is at the START of the transition, still carrying a heavy child-dependency burden, not enjoying a dividend.

Concept: The demographic dividend is a by-product of the demographic transition. As a country's death rate falls first and its birth rate falls afterwards, it passes through a phase in which the large cohorts born during the high-fertility years have grown up into working age while the cohorts behind them are smaller. For a few decades the working-age share of the population therefore rises and the dependency ratio — dependants divided by the working-age population — falls. That is the demographic window. It is important to be precise about what the dividend is: it is not extra people and it is not automatic growth. It is a POTENTIAL, realised only if the extra workers find productive employment, which is why policy discussion of the dividend is really discussion of skilling, education, health and female labour-force participation. If the jobs do not appear, the same age structure yields a demographic burden instead.

State PCS 2022 Q45 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q45 — Economy PYQ with Answer