AIDS spread could hamper India's economic growth: UN report, and China's aging population Options

[froglee]

NEW DELHI (AFP) - India's economy, which is growing at more than eight percent, could suffer a setback if the country does not check the spread of HIV/ AIDS, the United Nations Development Programme has warned.

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A UNDP report released in New Delhi studied the likely impact of the infection, which affects more than five million Indians, over a 14-year period starting 2002.

"Economic growth could decline by 0.86 percentage points over the period and per capita gross domestic product by 0.55 percentage points," said the report Thursday, entitled "The Macroeconomic and Sectoral Impacts of HIV and AIDS in India".

According to the study, the country's GDP could decline by 11,097 billion rupees (237 billion dollars) in 2015-16 at the 2002-03 prices, while the GDP per capita would decline by 7,610.61 rupees.

The UNDP said increases in spending on health by both individuals and the government lead to a decline in savings, which in turn affects investment thus slowing down growth.

Economic slowdown, it said, was brought about also by a decline in population growth, labour supply and labour productivity of HIV-affected people.

Labour supply was likely to fall by 0.31 percent, with unskilled labour the worst hit.

The government savings as a percentage of GDP were likely to fall by 0.67 percent, household savings by 1.15 percent and investment by 1.16 per cent, the study said.

"It is time to see policy action against AIDS as a growth-enhancing policy endeavour, and, first and foremost, dedicate adequate resources for this purpose," UNDP urged.

It identified industries using unskilled labour as likely to be hit the hardest by the spread of infection. Construction, chemicals, and mining and quarrying, capital goods and textiles were the most vulnerable.

An estimated 74 percent of people with HIV/AIDS did not disclose their status at their workplace. Around 10 percent of those who did so faced discrimination in the form of denial of job, loans, benefits and promotion.

The infection also had a bearing on education of children from HIV families. "Children from HIV households not only have a lower rate of enrolment than those from non-HIV households, but the dropout rates are higher and school attendance lower for those who have not dropped out."

It said most HIV-affected people were not only in their prime working age, but also the parents of young children, whose education was likely to be hit.

The study covered six southern and eastern states, some of the worst hit in India and more than 8,000 households.

In May Geneva-based UNAIDS said India had 5.7 million people living with HIV/AIDS -- the highest figure in the world, ahead of South Africa where the figure stands at 5.5 million.

The government says the number is 5.2 million.





So, demographically, China and India face different challenges. China has an aging population. And India has huge AIDS population and too many babies.

This post has been edited by froglee: Jul 21 2006, 12:38 AM

[froglee]

As China Ages, a Shortage of Cheap Labor Looms
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By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: June 30, 2006
SHANGHAI, June 29 — Shanghai is rightfully known as a fast-moving, hypermodern city — full of youth and vigor. But that obscures a less well-known fact: Shanghai has the oldest population in China, and it is getting older in a hurry.

Twenty percent of this city's people are at least 60, the common retirement age for men in China, and retirees are easily the fastest growing segment of the population, with 100,000 new seniors added to the rolls each year, according to a study by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. From 2010 to 2020, the number of people 60 or older is projected to grow by 170,000 a year.

By 2020 about a third of Shanghai's population, currently 13.6 million, will consist of people over the age of 59, remaking the city's social fabric and placing huge new strains on its economy and finances.

The changes go far beyond Shanghai, however. Experts say the rapidly graying city is leading one of the greatest demographic changes in history, one with profound implications for the entire country.

The world's most populous nation, which has built its economic strength on seemingly endless supplies of cheap labor, China may soon face manpower shortages. An aging population also poses difficult political issues for the Communist government, which first encouraged a population explosion in the 1950's and then reversed course and introduced the so-called one-child policy a few years after the death of Mao in 1976.

That measure has spared the country an estimated 390 million births but may ultimately prove to be another monumental demographic mistake. With China's breathtaking rise toward affluence, most people live longer and have fewer children, mirroring trends seen around the world.

Those trends and the extraordinarily low birth rate have combined to create a stark imbalance between young and old. That threatens the nation's rickety pension system, which already runs large deficits even with the 4-to-1 ratio of workers to retirees that it was designed for.

Demographers also expect strains on the household registration system, which restricts internal migration. The system prevents young workers from migrating to urban areas to relieve labor shortages, but officials fear that abolishing it could release a flood of humanity that would swamp the cities.

As workers become scarcer and more expensive in the increasingly affluent cities along China's eastern seaboard, the country will face growing economic pressures to move out of assembly work and other labor-intensive manufacturing, which will be taken up by poorer economies in Asia and beyond, and into service and information-based industries.

"For the last two decades China has enjoyed the advantage of having a high ratio of working-age people in the population, but that situation is about to change," said Zuo Xuejin, vice president of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. "With the working-age population decreasing, our labor costs will become less competitive, and industries in places like Vietnam and Bangladesh will start becoming more attractive."

India, the world's other emerging giant, also stands to benefit, with low wages and a far younger population than China.

Even within China, Mr. Zuo said, many foreign investors have begun moving factories away from Shanghai and other eastern cities to inland locations, where the work force is cheaper and younger.

As remote as many of these problems may seem today in Shanghai, the country's most prosperous city, evidence of the changes is already on abundant display. If Shanghai represents the future of China, it is in central Shanghai's Jingan district, where roughly 4,000 people, or 30 percent of the residents, are above 60, that one can glimpse that future.

Squads of lightly trained social workers monitor the city's older residents, paying regular house visits aimed at combating isolation and assuring that medical problems are attended to.

At 10 a.m. on a recent spring morning, Chen Meijuan walked up a narrow wooden stairway to the secondfloor apartment where Liang Yunyu has lived for the last 58 years.

"Good morning, Granny," Ms. Chen called out as she entered the 100-year-old woman's small bedroom. "Did you have a good night's sleep?"

Ms. Chen, 49, earns about $95 a month as one of 15 agents who monitor the neighborhood's elderly population. Her caseload exceeds 200.

"I usually pay visits to about five or six households a day, stay a little while and chat with them," she said. "For Grandma Liang I am a little more focused, visiting two or three times a week."

After being introduced to a foreign visitor, Ms. Liang regaled her guests with stories, ranging across the decades of the 20th century. She recounted the arrival of Japanese invaders in the city nearly 70 years ago, her opening of a kindergarten in 1958 and her husband's arrest and death in a labor camp during the Cultural Revolution 40 years ago.

"My daughter always invites me to live with her family, but I feel embarrassed to be with them," said, pausing from her tales. "I'm worried I might die in her home, so I prefer staying where I am."

Her son, Zha Yuheng, 76, a grandfather and retired textile industry worker, lives with her now, which also concerns her. "I am taken good care of here," she said, "but living with my son leaves him with a big burden, I'm afraid."

Mr. Zha protested that his mother was little trouble at all. "Every morning I get water for her and make sure it is not too hot or too cold, and she handles everything else on her own," he said. "She gets up, dresses, makes the beds and even makes food for herself."

In many wealthy societies the very old are candidates for nursing home care. That sector is still tiny in China, though, especially compared with the size of elderly population. Zhang Minsheng opened the city's first private nursing home in 1998 in an industrial area far from central Shanghai. It is now 95 percent occupied.

"People were not willing to enter nursing homes in the past, because they were considered places for those without descendants," Mr. Zhang said. "Now, from the standpoint of ordinary people, it is becoming a normal thing."

The average age of the residents of Mr. Zhang's home is 85, and most live several to a room, sleeping on narrow beds separated by flimsy partitions. Many pass the daytime hours in long corridors furnished with chairs, where they chat or simply stare into the distance.

The sheer magnitude of the aging phenomenon has Chinese officials and academics grasping for answers, but almost everyone agrees that there are no easy fixes. Population experts here speak of "patching one hole and exploding another."

China has a wide range of retirement ages, generally from 50 to 60. Raising the retirement age would relieve pressures on the pension system but make it harder for young people to find jobs. And it would be resented by many elderly people, most of whom have missed out on China's economic boom.

Lifting restrictions on internal migration raises the unwelcome prospect of a mass migration, while abandoning the one-child policy would be politically unpalatable.

The government has already tinkered with the policy. It now allows husbands and wives who were their parents' only children to have a second child, for example, and has eliminated a four-year waiting period between births for those eligible to have a second child.

But Chinese demographic experts say the leadership is unlikely to abolish the one-child rule, because it is reluctant to admit that one of its signature policies was in any way a failure — particularly in view of the disastrous population boom encouraged by Mao in the 1950's.

Moreover, lifting child-bearing restrictions might not help. Poorer people in the interior might have more children, but the rising middle class probably will not, experts say.

"More births would only change the structure of the population and prolong the aging process" of the society as a whole, said Ren Yuan, a professor at the Population Research Center of Fudan University in Shanghai. "But it has nothing to do with the number of old people. The scale of this large group has already become a reality. The beds you've got to add in nursing homes, the labor you need to take care of the old, is a reality than can't be changed."

[Neeraj]

froglee:today

sign..still these China vs India threads...

This post has been edited by Neeraj: Jul 21 2006, 01:25 AM

[ACMILAN1983]

The first article has NOTHING to do with Chinese Serious talk, why create a thread about it here, just put it in India Serious talk if you want to discuss it. These threads comparing India to China are getting on my nerves.

As for the topic, I touched on them before elsewhere, and can't be @rsed to do so again.

[toronto_chinese]

aids in china is probably as bad or even worse than india.

[aaaw]

aids in china is probably as bad or even worse than india.

China does have an HIV problem and the govt is taking a stand to fight it. I disagree with your comment unless you can prove it.

[toronto_chinese]

China does have an HIV problem and the govt is taking a stand to fight it. I disagree with your comment unless you can prove it.

you should prove me wrong too. haha all i am saying is "probably" .

"aids village" is something that is very famous http://www.terradaily.com/2003/030703120032.0pugsm6g.html

[froglee]

aids in china is probably as bad or even worse than india.

Actually, China has far fewer AIDS patients than India. It is estimated around 840000 in 2003. Go read https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ch.html

[toronto_chinese]

Actually, China has far fewer AIDS patients than India. It is estimated around 840000 in 2003. Go read https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ch.html

840,000? this is definitely way off from the true number. I would say couple of milion already get aids. China is too big, and many people don't have enough education and awarness of aids. So the number must be much bigger and is spreading very fast. But again I don't know the number.

here i find an article: http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf.../09/china.AIDS/

.............Chinese officials have reported that 23,905 people have AIDS as of March.

But Health Ministry experts say some 600,000 Chinese are infected, with the numbers growing by more than 30 percent a year.

The United Nations has said China will have 10 million or more AIDS sufferers by 2010 unless it acts decisively. ...........

[epicanthics]

India's problem isn't as big, because, well, we have access to information about it.

[froglee]

"here i find an article: http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf.../09/china.AIDS/

.............Chinese officials have reported that 23,905 people have AIDS as of March.

But Health Ministry experts say some 600,000 Chinese are infected, with the numbers growing by more than 30 percent a year. "

And these numbers are still not more than 840,000

"The United Nations has said China will have 10 million or more AIDS sufferers by 2010 unless it acts decisively. ..........."

True, just like if India and Russia will have 10 million or more AIDS in the future unless they act decisively.

[toronto_chinese]

just check the france CIA report, it says about 120,000 cases. And france is a very advanced country compared to china. Much better education, much more awarness about aids also they don't need to sell their blood for living. So with 1.3 billion of people, i would say the number is definitely much higher than 840000 and many people are still very poor and don't have enough food, enough money to pay for tution.

[froglee]

just check the france CIA report, it says about 120,000 cases. And france is a very advanced country compared to china. Much better education, much more awarness about aids also they don't need to sell their blood for living. So with 1.3 billion of people, i would say the number is definitely much higher than 840000 and many people are still very poor and don't have enough food, enough money to pay for tution.

The 840,000 number comes from CIA report too and isn't that much higher than 120,000.?I also suspect the real number of AIDS patients in China probably a little bigger than 840,000, but no way near India's number of AIDS patients.

And I hope I am not saying anything politically incorrect here. France has a lot of illegal immigrants from Africa and other third world country. Maybe that contributes some portion of its AIDS cases?

[Jagger]

China has 1.5 million people with HIV/AIDS according to UN estimates given in this article:

http://www.terradaily.com/2003/030703120032.0pugsm6g.html

However, that's still nowhere near as large as India's 5 million people with HIV/AIDS.

This post has been edited by Jagger: Jul 21 2006, 03:52 PM

[rahul1000]

aids in china is probably as bad or even worse than india.

Really? I don't think so.

[gomeny]

what does India's aids epidemic have to do with China serious talk?

[rahul1000]

what does India's aids epidemic have to do with China serious talk?

Nothing, nothing at all, this is in the wrong section.

[ACMILAN1983]

what does India's aids epidemic have to do with China serious talk?

I asked the same question above. But hey, at least people have made it relavent by comparing which country is a most AIDS sufferers.

My guess is the next thread will be, India v China, which country creates the most faeces. Winner gets title of "Greatest amount of potential renewable energy source manufactured".