The perversity of pronatalism in ageing nations

Many low-fertility nations, and some medium-fertility nations, have adopted pronatalist views and policies in recent years in response to increasing concern about the economic impacts of population ageing. This is despite demographic analysis demonstrating that manageable rates of population growth provide only a limited deferral of ageing, which is primarily a product of longevity. New insights into the economic cost of population growth, and the required expansion of infrastructure and service capacity to accommodate it, provide a clearer comparison of the costs and benefits of this policy shift. It reveals that population growth is much more costly than the extent of ageing it may off-set. The perspectives and misconceptions from economic conventions, accounting and semantics are explored to explain the blindness of public policymakers to the perverse impacts of a pronatalist stance.