Some implications of the changes in the world population distribution: How globalized will the world remain?

Abstract

For the first-world citizens, globalization seems to be an all-pervasive phenomenon; however, the global connectivity rates differ dramatically for various countries. What will the situation be in, let say, fifty years? The article aims to show how the future demographic changes can influence absolute numbers and relative proportions of societies with different levels of global connectivity. To estimate the national rates of global connectivity the authors rely on the countries' participation in global networks, such as trade in goods, trade in services, foreign direct investment (FDI), and international migration. As the scenario of the demographic future, the authors use medium population projections of 2017 calculated by the United Nations Population Division. The authors applied a two-stage method: first, they constructed network models and analyzed the structure of networks to reveal the positions of countries in order to estimate their rates of global connectivity and identify six groups of countries according to their global connectivity rates. Second, the authors combined the results of network analysis with demographic projections to find out how many people are expected to live in the countries with different connectivity rates in the nearest decades (let say, up to 2050) and in the more distant future (2100). The results show that nearly a half of the world population (3.46 billion) lives in highly-connected countries but the situation will dramatically change in the coming decades. The proportion of population in the highly- and highly-medium-connected countries will decline by 2050 and further by 2100, while the proportion of residents of medium- and low-connected (and to some extent of lowest-low-connected) countries will significantly grow.