Could someone read over this essay for me please?

Hi, could someone just read over this essay and check that it's okay? The essay title is:

"Governments face difficulties managing the effects of population change". To what extent do you agree with this?

My answer:

To a large extent, I do agree with this. Governments can face many difficulties when managing the effects of population change such as financial burdens as well as society’s outlook on these matters. For example, in Japan, where a third of their population are over 65 years of age, managing the ageing population is an incredibly large financial burden on the country. The cost of providing them with services would be two times the Japanese economy, which is the slowest growing of all G7 countries. There have been two attempts in order to reduce the impacts of the ageing population. The first was “Abenomics”, coined after the former President Shinzo Abe. His plan was to incentivise participation of women in the workforce, reduce healthcare costs and invest in innovating technologies in order to facilitate this. The second is a common strategy, which is to increase the retirement and pension age. While both theoretically should reduce the impacts of an ageing population through relieving an ageing population’s financial burden, Japan’s ageing population continues to grow at rapid rates, with studies estimating that nearly 50% of Japan’s population will be over 65 years of age by 2060, not to mention the act of increasing retirement ages is incredibly unpopular. Thus, governments risk being seen as unpopular by the general public as well as failing to remove the strain that ageing populations put onto public services, with increasing rates of pensioner crime due to better provision of services as well as access to a support network in prisons.

We may also see that governments in LICs would particularly struggle with managing effects of population change, seen in The Gambia. With a population made up of 95% Muslims, only recently was contraception seen as a “non-taboo” topic, with many Muslim and Vatican leaders in the 1994 Cairo UN Population Conference opposing most forms of family planning, especially abortion. Thus, their population is youthful with an 85% dependency ratio, 44% of which being young dependents, which caused overcrowding and strain on land and resources. To combat this, the Gambian government implemented a family planning program in the 1990s, this being the only attempt made to manage the population. Though fertility rates did decrease from 6.1 to 5.6 between the 1990s and 2013, this was arguably a very small decrease for the timespan that it occurred over as well as being insufficient due to the overlooking economic circumstances of The Gambia. As many in LICs see children as economic assets due to the fact that they can work on farms, many families would still feel the need to have large families due to the financial prosperity they are able to bring. Combined with the fact that around 50% of children work in The Gambia, this only brings into retrospect the importance that children have on the financial state of a family. To add, The Gambia has a high infant mortality rate (IMR) of 70 deaths per 1000 children, meaning that there would be more emphasis on having more children in order for more to make it to adulthood. Therefore, it would be incredibly difficult for The Gambia as well as other LICs to manage youthful populations without focusing on education and primary healthcare provision (such as through administering vaccines), which require more money and development, something that LICs have less of, meaning that it would add to the challenge of managing their populations.

Furthermore, managing population change in China due to strain on resources (particularly food, seen after the Great Famine in the 1960s) further illustrate these difficulties. The one-child policy was adopted in the 1970s to deal with a ballooning population due to Mao Zedong’s policies to increase the Chinese labour force. This prevented 400 million births and many critics attribute the rapid economic development of China to this policy, perhaps proving that it was successful to some extent. However, the after-effects of the policy now threaten the country’s future economic growth, which is predicted to surpass the US by the end of this decade. Due to this policy, there is a gender imbalance, with some 180 million more men than women, causing a large population of men to struggle with finding a wife. Combined with the brutal “996” work culture and an age of female emancipation causing a change in traditional family values, this has caused China’s fertility rate to decrease rapidly, with no signs of increasing despite the policy’s relaxation to 3 children. This has also created an ageing population, where more than 18% of the population is now over 65 years of age despite China still being an NEE. While this should cause a demographic dividend, the underdeveloped pension system in China as well as China’s current focus on shifting from being the world’s workshop to being an innovator in technology, this has increased the risk that the newly emerging ageing population poses to the country’s development. Therefore, the policy itself, although acknowledged as a factor in China’s economic growth, may now have caused more problems that threaten China’s future development and may even be seen as quite short-sighted. This clearly shows that in trying to manage the effects of population change, more difficulties have been created that now must be dealt with, perhaps hindering the trajectory of future economic growth.

To conclude, we see that the governments face many difficulties in managing effects of population change due to many factors. Usually, it appears that financial obstacles pose the main threat to managing populations, albeit ageing or youthful. Without sufficient financial support, population change cannot be managed adequately and so must be obtained in order to do so. There are also other factors such as short-sighted government policies as well as perhaps inability to tackle more efficient solutions such as focusing on improving healthcare provision or education, though this may be related to a country’s ability to facilitate these strategies financially.