Population
Economic Development · 4 question types
Exam Frequency Analysis
Past paper frequency (2018 to 2024)
This topic accounts for approximately 8% of your exam marks.
Population structure, birth/death rates, and the economic consequences of changing population appear in Section B roughly every other paper; typically 6 to 8 marks.
The demographic transition is not named in the syllabus, so you will not be asked about its stages, but it is a useful way of seeing how the reasons in section 2 fit together. As a country develops, its falls first (better healthcare, nutrition, clean water and sanitation) while the birth rate stays high, so the population grows quickly and is very young. Later the falls too (female education and paid work, contraception, lower infant mortality, the rising cost of children, urbanisation), so growth slows and the population ages.
This is why most low-income countries today have fast-growing, youthful populations, while most high-income countries have slow-growing, ageing ones, and a few, such as Japan, South Korea and Italy, now have birth rates low enough for the total population to shrink.