Abstract

The problem of the relationship between the population factor and the economic factor has occupied the population and development literature, and through this dialectical tension two main conflicting trends have crystallized regarding the treatment of this problem. The first trend believes that the relationship between the economic and population factors is a negative relationship, as the increase in absolute population numbers eats up the gains of the development process. It represents a severe strain on its limited resources, especially non-renewable ones. This trend reaches its conclusions by attributing the failure of development, the backwardness of societies, the decline in their living indicators, and the spread of unemployment, hunger, and poverty to the high rate of population growth, to which the rate of economic growth is unable to respond or keep up with its pace. The opposite direction sees that the relationship is a positive relationship from the perspective of what it provides for a broad, renewable supply of productive human wealth to the development process, and that development is the radical structural treatment for socio-demographic problems. Since the second half of the 1980s, an alternative trend to the previous two trends has emerged, known as the neutral population trend. The vision of this trend is that the relationship between population growth and economic growth is a relationship between two independent variables, meaning that this relationship is neither negative nor positive, but rather Neutral. In addition, both the pessimistic and optimistic trends focus on the quantitative aspect of the issue of the relationship between population and development more than they focus on the complementary qualitative considerations of population, while the neutral trend neglects demographic changes and neutralizes their impact on economic growth, focusing on economic growth as the only solution to development. This research paper adopts a theoretical approach that believes that the population factor is a variable dependent on the conditions of the social environment. There are no absolute general laws to which population dynamics are subject, in isolation from the state of economic and social development. The nature and level of development of demographic indicators in any society are linked to the nature and level of development of various other societal indicators. Through, with, and because of this interconnectedness of change (or development), quantitative changes in societal phenomena and processes (including demographics) are transformed into qualitative changes. The most prominent example of this is the issue of exploiting the openness of the “demographic window,” the path of which this research paper attempts to trace in Syria from the moment it was expected to open at the beginning of the current millennium, until the risk of a demographic shift in its process being anticipated as a result of the war and its negative repercussions and direct repercussions on the process of demographic transformation in its second phase. The demographic window is ultimately a demographic dynamism resulting from the movement of population variables and the change in basic population growth factors (births, deaths), as well as qualitative changes in the age structure of the population. It provides a unique development opportunity for society in its development path, and achieving this depends on the suitability and maturity of the reasonable conditions, and the arrival of economic and social factors to a level where the quantitative demographic changes that pave the way for the opening of the demographic window are transformed into qualitative changes that give society substantial demographic-developmental returns.

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