Demographic Change and Demand for Food in Australia

The analysis of global population forecasts of the past 30 years by the US National Academy of Sciences confirms that errors have been considerable and that population forecasts have generally been upward-biased. Recent stochastic population projections also yield wide error bounds. We discuss the demographic implications of one set of stochastic projections and adapt a standard global economic model to estimate the implications of population forecast errors for the performance of the global economy and its agricultural sectors. The model is GTAP-Dynamic, a recursively dynamic, applied general equilibrium model of the world economy widely used in the analysis of trade policy. The results indicate that the growth rate of population in the rest of the world is important for Australia’s economic health. If the global population grows more slowly than the median forecast suggests, Australia’s manufacturing and services sectors would gain at the expense of commodities. The impact on individual agricultural sectors also depends on which region the slower population growth occurs