![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.statistics.gov.my\/portal\/images\/stories\/files\/LatestReleases\/population\/carta8.jpg?resize=580%2C421\")
<\/p>\nI was reading, or rather re-reading, the Economic Transformation Program and I was a bit obsessed with its projection of 3.3 million total new jobs between whenever the program was supposed to begin up to year 2020. The figure sounds a bit too optimistic that I do not think there will enough workers to take up the jobs, especially \u00a0the geometric average growth between 2000 and 2010 was just below 2.0% per year and\u00a0when population growth for 2010 was at the measly 1.5% per year. The population growth rate is slowing down.<\/p>\n
So, I did a bit of investigation and was planning to do some back-of-the-envelope modeling until a different but related matter attracted my attention. It is the population profile for Malaysia.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The chart was pulled directly from the Department of Statistics because I was too lazy to pull out the numbers from a database available to me at work. It was already 5PM at the time I started writing this and I did not want to stay in the office for too long today, especially when I had to pack my belongings to catch a plane early the day after tomorrow.<\/p>\n
Anyway, what interested me here was the population increase. Specifically, population increase according to cohorts.<\/p>\n
The chart shows how important (legal) immigration is to Malaysian population growth.<\/p>\n
How do you spot immigration from the graph?<\/p>\n
Well, under an autarkic case where there is no immigration, it is impossible for a cohort in a particular year to increase in size in later years.<\/p>\n
Yet, if you look at the chart, all cohorts between 0 and 34 actually increased in size in the 10 years that passed between the two population surveys (2000 and 2010). To be clear, the 0-34 cohorts in 2000 should be compared with those aged from 10 to 44 in 2010.<\/p>\n
There are two explanations that I can think of. One, which is less likely or probably insignificant, error in one of the surveys, or both. Two, which is likelier, is immigration.<\/p>\n
That was a pretty sizable legal immigration between 2000 and 2010. Easily more than 1 million legal immigrants in 10 years.<\/p>\n
Most of the immigrants were in their prime years. In other words, they were young, productive and probably contributed to economic growth.<\/p>\n
But there is one peculiarity. Look at the 65-69 cohort in 2000. In 2010, the above 75-year-old cohort increased. Odd is it not? Or maybe Malaysian longevity is getting really good.<\/p>\n
Other cohorts exhibited a decreasing trend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was reading, or rather re-reading, the Economic Transformation Program and I was a bit obsessed with its projection of 3.3 million total new jobs between whenever the program was supposed to begin up to year 2020. The figure sounds a bit too optimistic that I do not think there will enough workers to take […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,11],"tags":[1527,775,1200],"class_list":["post-10425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-society","tag-demographics","tag-immigration","tag-population-growth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10425"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10425\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10431,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10425\/revisions\/10431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}