Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Lavanya Balachandran, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

When Pakistan broke into two in 1971 in very bloody circumstances, Bangladesh found itself as the world’s most densely populated nation apart from a few city states. Many observers saw impoverished Bangladesh, subject to frequent natural disasters, as a “basket case”. Instead, over the past 30 years, Bangladesh has surprised many observers, lowering its fertility rate to near-replacement level, making considerable progress in raising levels of education and health, and bringing more women into the workforce. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s fertility rate is 67 per cent higher than Bangladesh, its future population growth is alarming (and that alarm has finally registered in top levels of government, following publication of the 2017 Population Census findings), and it has made only feeble progress in raising levels of health and education and dealing with gender inequality.

Why have developmental trends in the two countries gone against expectations? Some likely reasons will be canvassed in the seminar, and some ideas put forward about future development prospects for both countries.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Gavin Jones is Emeritus Professor at Australian National University. After working for Population Council in New York, then in Thailand and Indonesia, he was with the Demography and Sociology Program at Australian National University for 28 years, serving as head of program for an eight-year period. This was followed by an 11-year period with National University of Singapore (NUS). He retired in December 2014 as Director of NUS’s JY Pillay Comparative Asia Research Centre. Professor Jones has conducted research on varied subjects in the field of demography and human resource development, in recent years focusing especially on low fertility regimes in Asia, delayed and non-marriage, urbanization issues, and equity aspects of educational development. He was the founding editor of the journal Asian Population Studies. Since retiring from NUS, he has undertaken a number of consultancies for the UNFPA in Bangladesh and Pakistan, as well as preparing a study for the Asia-Pacific Regional Office of UNFPA on “Sustainable development and demographic trends in the Asia Pacific region”.

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