The end of the population explosion

This chapter concentrates on changes in demographic regimes in the Southern Mediterranean, looking in particular at the connections between population size and potential labour market opportunities within and beyond the borders of these countries, with a focus on gender and the education levels of jobseekers, as well as at short-and long-term migration perspectives. This puts the emphasis predominantly on the potentials of younger cohorts and their position within this process. The gradual emergence of societies of longevity in the Arab world, with their particular problems, is also addressed. To begin the analysis, however, I start by doing away with the misconceptions and myths about population development in these Southern and Southeastern countries of the Mediterranean that have illegitimately dominated the public discourse.

The image of a ‘population explosion’ has always been attached to the Arab world in the Southern Mediterranean, but this image is false because fertility decline is well under way. Total fertility rates (TFRs) in the Southern Mediterranean are rapidly converging with the low levels reached in the North, with sometimes remarkable inversions: for instance, the present TFRs in Lebanon and Tunisia are now lower than or close to those in France.

In the 1990s it was necessary to develop alternative forecasts to convince the scientific community that something had changed in the South, that a new demography in the Southern Mediterranean was unfolding. Projections were based on this key variable of modernisation and development: women's education (Courbage and Fargues, 1992). The rationale behind these projections was that, in spite of the well-documented link between level of education and TFR, it was not explicitly considered in the projections offered by the United Nations (UN) Population Division or the US Census Bureau or The World Bank. Figures 9.1 and 9.2 show how in the southern shore country of Morocco, the TFR has been decreasing among all three educational groups of women, including the higher fertility group, illiterate women.

The matrix-linking forecast of future educational achievements with the evolution of partial TFRs by level of education has a powerful predicting power for forecasting population growth.