Geography Population

There are many positive and negative impacts of international migration.

Migrations is when people move from one permanent home to another with the intention to living there for at least a year.

International migration is beneficial to the country that is recieveing the migration because it has gained a source of cheap labour and the taxes can contribute towards the pensions of the elderly. However, the migrants may have a difficulty to speak the language of the new country thus this can create racial tension.

The country of origin may have lost their work force as many people have migrated to other countrues but migrants send money home to their families.

Some people may migrate to have a better standard of living  by moving voluntarily however some poeple may go in refugee camps.

In the 1950s China was suffering from exponential growth that had to be controlled so in the ate 1970s the Chinese government intruduced a number of measures to reduce the country's birth rate and slow the population growth rate. The most important of the new meaures was the one-child policy which forbidded couples to have more than one child.

However, there were incentives offered to people who followed the rules of the policy. The goverment offered benefits such as increased access to education for all plus childcare and healthcare to families that followed the policy, these benefits encouraged couples to have only one child.

Problems with the policy

• Couples who had more than one child were heavily fined and didn't recieve the benefits.
• The policy keenly resisted in rural areas, where it was traditional to have large families. It was also considered that a boy child was better than a girl child as the boy could help the father in farming hence many farmers were dissappointed when having a girl and they couldn't afford to get another child because they had to pay the fine.
• In urban areas, the policy has been enforced strictly but remote rural areas have been harder to control.

Impacts of the policy

There are many impacts of the policy such as the birth rate has fallen since 1979, and the rate of population growth is now 0.7 per cent which means that the Chinese government has diverted the famine.

Due to the traditional preference for boys, there are large number of girls that have ended up homeless or in orphanages. In 200, it was reported that 90% of foetuses aborted in China were female. However, there are many couples from other countries such as the US that wish to adopt children and many of them have. 

The policy created 'Little Emperors', which means that the only child was mostly boys and were spoilt by parents and grandparents. As a result, there was gender imbalance of the Chinese population. Today it is estimated that men outnumber women by more than 60 million.

Long Term Effects

During the recent years there have been changes to the policy such as ouples can now apply to have a second child if their first child is a girl, or if both parents are themselves only-children.

While China's population is now rising more slowly, it still has a very large total population (1.3 billion in 2008) and China faces new problems, including:

• the falling birth rate - leading to a rise in the relative number of elderly people
• fewer people of working age to support the growing number of elderly dependants - in the future China could have an ageing population

France is tackling an ageing population, therefore they made a pronatal policy to encourage people to have children.

One of their many incentives is to give three years of paid parental leave, which can be used by either the mother or the father, this would encourage coulpes to have children because this would reduce financial pressure.

The French government also offered day care for children younger than three years old, is subsidised by the government so parents are able to work. Thus this encourages people to have children.

Encouraging more people to have children menas that the younger working population would be able to support the ageing population by paying for their retiremnt by paying taxes.

The policy also stated that the more children a woman has the earlier she will be able to retire and this is quite effective as the woman would not have to work for couple of more years as this would encourage couples to have children.