Demographic Deposit, Dividend and Debt

In spite of the rising academic attention to path-dependency in social history, when it comes to the history of economic thinking, we seem to be stuck in a Markovian nirvana where debates of the past are forgotten under the onslaught of new ideas. Nowhere is this more evident than in the discourse on demographic dividend that ignores decades of debates surrounding the relationship between population growth and economic development.  This paper seeks to fill this niche by: (1) Placing the discourse on demographic dividend in the context of past debates on population and development; (2) Differentiating between demographic deposit and demographic dividend, i.e. the mechanical aspects of population composition and potentially transformative power of these changes, as well as the conditions under which these may affection Indian economy and (3) Focusing on the upcoming demographic debt as the population ages.