The hazards of youth.

• Author: Mastny, Lisa

In more than 100 countries, people are getting not only more numerous, but younger. "Youth bulges," combined with economic stagnation and unemployment, can burden these countries with disproportionately high levels of violence and unrest--severely challenging their hopes for social and economic stability.

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Just before dawn on April 28, a band of machete- and knife-wielding attackers launched a surprise assault on a police post in Thailand's southern province of Pattani. Failing to overrun the building, the militants fled to the nearby Krue Sae mosque, where they engaged in a three-hour shootout with heavily armed government security forces. Troops riddled the 16th century red brick building with automatic weapon fire, killing more than 30 of the attackers and leaving their bodies sprawled in pools of blood.

The uprising was only one of several clashes in Thailand's restive south that day, which ended with at least 108 suspected militants dead across three provinces. It marked a severe escalation of four months of unrest in a country that had not seen such bloodshed in three decades. As news of the conflict spread, analysts attributed the tensions to rising ethnic discontent among the south's largely Muslim population, which has long complained of cultural, religious, and economic repression by the central government in Bangkok. In an address to the nation soon after the attacks, however, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatr pointed to another variable: the age and prospects of the combatants, most of whom were under the age of twenty. "They are poor and have little education and no jobs," he noted. "They don't have enough income and have a lot of time, so it creates a void for people to fill."

Unlike the more prosperous north, Thailand's south has lagged on several key development indicators, including demographics. Although population growth in the country overall has slowed dramatically, reaching "replacement level" at just above two children per woman by the mid-1990s, birth rates in the southern provinces remain high. Meanwhile, industrial growth in the region has stagnated, leaving few opportunities for this surging young population.

Thailand is not the only country in the world feeling the effects of a demographic imbalance. According to the United Nations, more than 100 countries world-wide had characteristic "youth bulges" in 2000, i.e., young adults ages 15 to 29 account for more than 40 percent of all adults. All of these extremely youthful countries were in the developing regions. By and large, the youth bulge is a thing of the past in North America and Europe, where the young adult share of the population is only about 25 percent of all adults.

Loss of Opportunity

In most cases, a youth bulge is the result of several past decades of high birth rates. It typically occurs in countries that are still in the earlier stages of their transitions to slower-growing populations: although infant and child mortality have begun to fall, birth rates still remain high, resulting in higher proportions of children surviving overall. A youth bulge usually lingers for at least two decades after fertility begins to decline, as large cohorts of children mature into young adulthood. If low fertility is maintained, however, this bulge gradually disappears.

Other demographic processes can create a youth bulge as...