In my Modern World Study class, we study about population development. This includes studying about demographic transition stages and dependency ratio. For clarification, demographic transition stages rely upon how developed each country is depending on its’ death rate, birth rate and dependency ratio. On the other hand, dependency ratio is the number of non-working citizens depending on the working number of citizens. We calculate this by find the total number if people age from 0-14 years old and 65-80+ years old, because these are people who most rely on others (kids depending on their parents and old people depending on their children). The gaps in between these age ranges are those who work (teenagers and adults) for the young and old. These are vital factors that lead to advancement of the country, taking it to the side developed countries. The country that I chose to perform my research on was Brazil. As we may all know, Brazil is the largest country in geographical area. It is consisted of approximately 201,103,330 (according to http://www.census.gov) which is also the fifth largest number of population. After finding out the number of population of each age range I have constructed a demographic pyramid. According to the pyramid, Brazil is a developing country, near to being developed. This pyramid tells you about how many people there are of each age range and indicates the dependency ratio which tells you the dependency ratio. This country is categorized to be in a demographic transition stage 3, or as you can see on the graph that the ends of both sides are starting to curve inwards. From the calculation that I have done, it says that approximately 24,526,319 non-working people are depending on 76,025,346 working people. This may not seem too good, but in reality it is a satisfying number. The aim of dependency ratio of each country is to have lesser non working citizens to rely on more working citizens (for example 5 people depending on 10). When this goal is achieved, it makes the country efficient with its’ economic and decreasing poverty as well. But Brazil has not reached its’ ‘developed’ stage yet, since there are still weaknesses in how the country is organized. there is a huge gap between social level, if you are rich, then you travel around in helicopters and live a very luxurious live, for if you are poor then you are incredibly unfortunate financially and 31% of the population are lingering in poverty! Many of these are children which cannot yet get a job and need the help from adults. The problem being mainly, because Brazil has such a huge population and less than 40% are employed and those who are employed as farmers and workers the wages paid here are significantly lower than in other countries. This problem is created by the labor surplus, meaning there are more workers in the country, than there are jobs available. Another problem is that despite the developing stage 3 they are in the government of Federative Republic of Brazil still is not very strong. They exhibit huge debt, which from $213 billion (in 1995) shot up to about $230.3 billion dollars!! Butttttt! The scarcity of natural resources in this country is not a problem to the country. Brazil is one of the country where its’ original forests are preserved. They also have laws that land owners have to preserve native plants. Although, the environment is threatened by mining, old and gas extraction, cattle ranching and more but their forests are pretty well protected. As for the problem of poverty, I believe that as the development continues, it will sure bring better living conditions to both the rich and poor.
Brazil is currently in demographic transition stage 2, according to the demographic pyramid. This means that it is half way developed. There are high birthrate but there are also small number or people who live their life to the eighties. Considering all the things they are doing, either economically or environmentally Brazil is really on its' way developing.
THESE ARE SOME LINKS THAT MAY BE PRETTY INTERESTING IF YOU WANT TO KNOW SOME MORE :D
- Brazil Country Profile
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