South Asia Investor Review

India's population has aged faster than expected while its economic growth has slowed over the last decade. This raises the obvious questions: Will India get old before it gets rich? Is India getting poorer relative to its peers in the emerging markets?  India's Population Aging. Source: Semafor As India's birth rate declines rapidly, the proportion of people age 60 and over is rising in the general population. This is particularly true of the southern states like Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Meanwhile, the expected demographic dividend from the youth bulge in the country has yet to materialize. High youth  unemployment  is threatening to cause serious social instability in the world's most populous country. It is also causing a massive  brain drain .   India's GDP Per Capita Compared to Emerging Markets Average. Source: IMF India is losing its best and brightest to the West, particularly to the United States, at an increasingly rapid pace. A 2023 study of the 1,...

Nearly 700,000 Pakistanis have left to work overseas in the first 10 months of the current calendar year, according to Pakistan's Bureau of Emigration Overseas Employment ( BEOE ). The worker migration from Pakistan had dipped to 225,000 in 2020 and 280,000 in 2021 due to Covid restrictions around the world. The yearly average for the last decade was over half a million Pakistanis migrating to other countries for work.  In August this year, the State Bank of Pakistan said in its " Half Year Report 2021-22 " that “(t)he monthly flow of Pakistani workers (overseas) has reverted to pre-Covid levels (of 65,000 per month).” The data from International Organization for Migration ( IOM ) shows that a lot more of the Pakistan migrants are now skilled labor while the share of unskilled migrants is declining: "Pakistani migrant workers were skilled (42%) and involved in semi-skilled jobs such as welders, secretaries, masons, carpenters, plumbers and so on. Another proportion o...

Among 10 countries with the estimated net outflow of migrants exceeding 1 million over the period from 2010 through 2021, Pakistan saw 16.5 million migrants move overseas, the highest in the world, according to a report titled "World Population Prospects 2022" released by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs ( UN DESA ).  Pakistani Workers' Overseas Migration Data (2010-2021). Source: Bureau of Emigration In many of these countries with more than one million people leaving, the outflows were due to temporary labor movements, such as for Pakistan (net outflow of 16.5 million), India (3.5 million), Bangladesh, (2.9 million), Nepal (1.6 million) and Sri Lanka (1.0 million).  The report also said that India's population will surpass China's in 2023. Over half of the global population increase up to 2050 will be in just 8 countries: Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines & Tanzania. Populatio...

Muslim women's fertility rate in Indian Occupied Kashmir has sharply declined to just 1.4, far below the replacement level of 2.1, according to India's latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5).  Is this the result of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's oppression in  Kashmir ? Is it because of fewer Muslim young men in the occupied territory? Is it part of the Hindu Nationalist policy to change the demographics of Kashmir? Is it slow  genocide ?  Kashmiris Demanding Azadi From India Just over a week ago, India’s health ministry revealed that the country’s total fertility rate (TFR)—the average number of children that an Indian woman can expect to give birth to in her lifetime—has fallen below 2.1, which is to say below the “replacement” level at which births equal deaths. Muslim majority territory of Kashmir under Indian military occupation saw the biggest decline to just 1.4, the lowest TFR  reported by NFS-5. Hindu Nationalist politicians, including Pri...

A headline in the Economist magazine's recent issue screams: "Bangladesh's GDP per person is now higher than Pakistan's". Let's examine this development to understand its causes. Per Capita GDP: The  Economist article  explains its headline as follows: "Last month revealed a remarkable turnaround. Bangladesh’s GDP per person is now higher than Pakistan’s. Converted into dollars at market exchange rates, it was $1,538 in the past fiscal year (which ended on June 30th). Pakistan’s was about $1,470....Strange as it may sound, Bangladesh jumped ahead because of an advance in Pakistan. On August 25th Pakistan released the results of its census, updating earlier population estimates. They showed that the country has  207.8m people , more than 9m more than previously thought. It may now have the fifth biggest population in the world, surpassing Brazil’s. But the new count also lopped 4-5% off Pakistan’s GDP per person, the arithmetic consequence of revealing...

Guest Post by Rashid Ahmad You should go back and visit. You would be surprised! Pakistan in your mind may be frozen in time, but real Pakistan has moved on. Everything has changed. Pakistani Capital Islamabad You will find both familiarity and alienness there. It would appear to you like a dream. Or perhaps like being on Star Trek Holodeck, where things are familiar but there are new actors on the deck, and you are bit of a stranger. First thing that would hit you would be the increase in population.  Too many people  every where, compared to the time you left Pakistan. Some areas that were farms and free spaces when you were there would now be occupied by  new housing developments . The physical appearances would have changed. There would not be any complete transformation to prosperity, but new buildings replacing the old ones, and  new motorways , would change the physical reality. You would find distances have shrunk. The places that seemed far ...

Multiple western newspaper headlines are screaming of a " disaster in the making " in Pakistan after the latest population census in the country. These headlines beg the following questions:  Is Pakistan's total fertility rate of 2.62 children per woman a bigger disaster than the sub-replacement level of less than 2 children per woman in the West? Are the rapidly aging western societies and declining working population less of a disaster than Pakistan with its younger population and a growing percentage of it in the work force?  To answer these questions, let's consider the following quote: “So where will the children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from people who are at odds with the modern world. Such a trend, if sustained, could drive human culture off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist course, gradually creating an anti-market culture dominated by fundamentalism - a new dark ages.” ― Philip Longman,  The Empty Cradle: How F...