A study on population dynamics in “Belt & Road” countries and their implications

China’s Belt & Road (“B&R”) initiative has attracted much attention in recent years. Many studies have assessed the potential impacts of this initiative from the economic, political, foreign relations, and military perspectives. However, very little attention has been paid to examine the opportunities and challenges of this new initiative from a demographic perspective. Therefore, this study investigates into the population dynamics of 65 countries in the B&R region, and explores the demographic dynamics of this regional cooperation model. Based on graphic visualization, the demographic heterogeneities within the B&R region, in terms of current stages of demographic transitions, population age structure, and demographic windows of opportunities have been revealed. Furthermore, a model-based cluster analysis has been conducted to classify the B&R countries into two groups. One group consists of countries with younger population, low education access, and larger gender gap in the labor market, while the other group comprises of more aged population and has better performances in economic development, education enrolment, and female labor participation. The demographic windows of opportunities in the former group will remain open for the coming decades; whereas the windows have already closed or is about to close very soon in the latter group. The former group should take lessons from the latter concerning how to better prepare themselves for the demographic transition. Moreover, the curvilinear relationship between wealth and well-being has a complicated structure and the B&R initiative should focus not only on economic development but also on the human well-being.