AGE STRUCTURE EVOLUTION IN SOME SUB-SAHARAN COUNTRIES: THE ADVANTAGE OF AGEING

Demography, resorting to the formal rigor of mathematics of populations, builds scenarios for the future that contribute to feed collective fears. For more than fifty years from the fundamental works of Frank W. Notestein (Notenstein F.W., 1945) and Kingsley Davis (Davis K., 1945) on the demographic transition the fear indicated by the projections has been the overpopulation, in other words, the pressure that the population growth is supposed to exercise on the means of production, in particular on material resources and labour. The fear of an overly rapid population growth has focused particularly on the Southern populations that came later in time (than those of the North) in the phase of the population explosion. Later, however, the evident dramatic declines in fertility in different countries of the South, the United Nations has had to revise their projections assuming that the world population could reach a maximum amount significantly lower than previously expected. As argued by the economist Walt Whitman Rostow, theorist of “The Stages of Economic Growth”, in the next few decades, the planet will not be threatened by overpopulation, but, on the contrary, by the reduction of growth and, therefore, by the perspective of demographic stagnation (Rostow W.W., 1998). This finding reveals a reverse fear which could affect, once again, in an insidious manner, the South more than the North since the South manifests a marked retardation in the awareness of the on-going slowdown of its growth and of the onset of a progressive ageing process. It is not, in fact, only a challenge for industrialized countries, which have already become familiar with the idea of ageing, but also, and perhaps above all, for the least developed countries that are not prepared for such a change.