Security & Conflicts

GLOBAL INVESTOR FOCUS Security & Conflicts — 48
Photo: Thomas Eugster
Thomas Straubhaar is Professor of Economics
at Hamburg University and Director of
the Hamburg Institute for World Economics.
His latest work is “The Costs and Benefits
of European Immigration,” a report released
within the Gaining from Migration project
coordinated by the OECD. see full biography on page 70
the number of people living in the industrialized nations will remain
nearly constant at the present level of 1.2 billion until the year 2050,
in the lesser-developed countries the aggregate population is expected
to rise, from the current 5.3 billion to 6.7 billion in 2025,
increasing to 8.0 billion by the year 2050. Included in these numbers
is an enormous surge in the number of young people. Roughly
half the world’s population is under the age of 25, and around
one-third of the populace in the lesser-developed economies is
under the age of 15. Education and health care for youth play a
seminal role and are becoming increasingly decisive factors in
determining whether and how they can succeed in overcoming
poverty, improving living standards and thus providing young people
with an alternative to squalor, as well as the prospect of hope
for a better life.
In order to accomplish this endeavor of the century, kindergartens,
elementary and high schools must be financed. However, it is
particularly important to prioritize education and then later on to
create jobs. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently pointed
out that today roughly half of the total 200 million unemployed
people worldwide are under the age of 25. The current probability
that young people will not find employment is about three times
greater than for job seekers over the age of 25. 3 The proportion of
young people under the age of 25 in the workforce globally shrank
from 52% in 1995 to 47% in 2005. Moreover, the demographic
trend will not make the search for mass employment any easier
for the young people, whose ranks will grow into the billions. What
will happen if the youth in the lesser-developed economies believe
they have little chance of finding a well-paid job? The consequence
would be that many make the journey to the West or the North.
Desperate refugees fleeing Africa by boat in the summer of
2006 dramatically demonstrated to prosperous Europeans just
what price some people are willing to pay in order to pursue their
dream of a better life abroad. Many others leave their homeland on
paths hardly less risky than an overcrowded, ill-equipped boat.
Today, about 200 million people are living in a country other than
their homeland. That number seems relatively small – a mere 3% of
the world’s total population. But it becomes significant when looked
at from other perspectives. The number of emigrés corresponds
to the population of Brazil – the world’s fifth-largest country in
terms of inhabitants. Two hundred million foreigners is a large
number of people even when looking back through history. The
trend in international migration has grown tremendously in the last
two decades and is expected to prevail in the future. More and
more destitute people in the South and the East are discovering
the prosperity of the North through the media and the Internet.
Some will attempt to migrate to the promised lands, striving to reap
rewards for themselves from the riches of an affluent society.
Cheap mass transportation provides the means of exodus for everincreasing
numbers of people across the longest distances. Furthermore,
modern telecommunications enable these migrants to
maintain contact with their homelands, spreading the word about
life in a foreign land by simple means. Networks and channels have
emerged that can easily trigger chain migration.
The trend in cross-border migration will become stronger rather
than weaker in the coming years, the pace should rather accelerate
than decelerate, and this will pose greater rather than fewer challenges
for the host countries. In search of a better life elsewhere,
people will migrate to faraway lands across increasingly vast distances.
Consequently, the differences between a receiving society