Archives of Peking University News - PKU English - 北京大学

北京大学英语新闻网/Peking University News
Beijing Forum 2007: Academic Briefing
of the Population Panel (Ⅲ)
By Zhang Andi
PKU NEWS 2007--11--05
http://ennews.pku.edu.cn/news.php?s=194234360
Peking University, Beijing, Nov. 3, 2007: the Berkeley Session of the panel ‗Diversity
of Population Development and Health Security‘ of Beijing Forum 2007 was held at
Meeting Room 1 of Yingjie Exchange Center of Peking University this morning. The
topic of this session is Population Challenges for China and the world, about which
three noted Berkeley professors addressed a speech each.
In the introduction speech, Prof. Malcom Potts pointed out that the accelerating
development of human society brings about tremendous changes in population
dynamic. And natural environment, science and technology, industry,
communication, globalization all affected people's lives quickly. Thus he believed
that we should discuss population issues in a framework with full consideration of
historical and global dimensions.
Then Prof. Potts analyzed the reasons why Asian tigers have small families and
attributed it to four factors which are increased socio-economic progress, improved
education, lower unemployment, and health and autonomy of women. Then he
insisted that economic development could not take off until the population growth
rate was lower than the economic growth rate and once family size began to fall the
'demographic dividend', permitting high rates of saving, gave economic growth an
extra boast. In the end he concluded that Asian tigers‘ experience in family planning
can be translated into an essential element needed to lift other countries out of
poverty.
Later on, Prof. Martha Campbell justified from her analysis that low fertility is a
necessary factor to get rid of poverty. As a female expert, she stressed the
significance of fertility regulation. A lot of barriers to fertility regulation were identified,
among which are too high prices, unreachable outlets, unavailable contraception,
misinformation, limited method choices, hard-obtainable safe abortion, religions
constrain and so on. She believed that the countries of East Asia largely overcame
these barriers, and a new paradigm for understanding what causes fertility decline
provides hope that the demographic barrier to development and health security,
including maternal health, can be overcome. In the end she proposed a freedom
model for fertility change compared with the standard model. The former model
419