It describes what has happened in the UK, this means that even though it cannot be used to predict what will happen in the UK, we can use it as an implement to look back on our development as a country and comprehend how we arrived in our current situation.
Many other countries in North America and Europe went through similar changes as they industrialised. Some of the statistics from their development towards socioeconomic success was fed into the model, this helps to make it more reliable as it is based on evidence from more than one country.
Some newly industrialised such as Singapore and South Korea also seemed to go through similar stages, but faster than countries like Britain had done. This faster progress does not mean the DTM is ineffective as there is no time phase on the model. Countries are likely to progress through the model at different paces, due to their diverse access to necessary resources.
The model helps to explain what has happened and why it has happened in the particular sequence. This is useful, because it helps to explain population change, identify anomalous data and allows us to understand why some countries might not have followed the pattern. Also, the current DTM works perfectly for western industrialised countries that have a similar system of government to the UK, this is in all probability because all of the data for the DTM comes from this type of country.
Despite these advantages there are some limitations; though this may work for industrialising countries, it is not relevant to non industrialising countries. Countries that are for example, against becoming westernised and are happy in their current state. Also, some countries are not industrialising because they have a corrupt government and so wealth is not evenly distributed and so whilst some people or areas of a country may be advancing the country on the whole is not.
The model assumes that stage 2 follows directly from industrialisation. In many countries this has not been the case. The factors that caused the death rate to start falling (better medical care, better sanitation etc.) were imported from colonising countries and so arrived far more quickly than in Europe. This means that it was not a necessity for countries to industrialise to lower the death rate and so whilst the country might, technically, be progressing through the model, it is not industrialising.
Similarly the model assumed that stage 3 followed several decades after stage 2 and that death rate fell as a consequence of changes brought about by changes in the birth rate. This has often not been the case. In some countries the onset of stage 3 was held back by the population’s attitudes to family size, birth control, status, women (many believe that emancipation is necessary for industrialisation and socioeconomic change), religion etc. In other cases the fall was speeded by government intervention such as China’s one child per family policy and some of it’s subsequent population policies.
The original model had had to be adapted to include a 5th stage. This seemed to happening in some countries of Western Europe and in Japan in the late 20th century. It is now clearly seen in some countries in east and central Europe, where death rate exceeds the birth rate. As one stage had to be added, is it not feasible that a 6th or even a 7th stage be added at some stage in the future? It is foolish to believe that our conception of fully industrialised will always be what it is today.
Countries of southern Africa (and other areas may follow), where the death rate has risen dramatically due to HIV/Aids, appear to have slipped back into a section more like stage 1 or have possibly been thrown forwards into stage 5 with very little industrialisation taking place. The model does not help to predict the future of these countries.
The DTM is certainly useful in predicting the future of regions inside Europe and the United States and also in looking back at their past to understand how they arrived at their present. However, there are severe limitations when looking at countries outside of these regions; the timescale of the model, especially in several South-east Asian countries such as Hong Kong and Malaysia, is being squashed as they develop at a much faster rate than did the early industrialised countries, therefore making the time scale, and consequently the utility of the DTM obsolete. Another factor effecting this is cultural differences, many countries are against the idea of becoming westernised, and as the DTM follows the patter of western countries, it is unlikely that the model would work for such countries. Some countries have religious views that make women objects to provide families and shun the use of contraceptives; this should effectively prevent a country from being able to progress out of stage 1.
Even in western culture the ability to make future projections is limited, because most countries in Europe and the US are what we consider to be fully industrialised so we have no data to predict out future. Because demographic trends sometimes change in unexpected ways, it is important that all demographic projections be updated on a regular basis to incorporate new trends and newly developed data, and therefore should not rely on one model.
I believe that it is not necessary for countries to share the same experiences as Europe and the US to pass through a demographic transition. That is not the say the demographic transition that regions outside of these areas will pass through will not be different to the changes already experienced. The experiences a country has, does much to shape it’s government and culture, and it is these factors that have the most significant effect on demographic transition, therefore it is only logical, that countries with differing experiences should have diverse demographic transition.
Neither socioeconomic change nor demographic transition is a prerequisite of the other, but they coexist and influence each other as a country develops.
There are certainly multiple ways to reach a similar end. For example, countries that are given aid or have imported factor that cause death rate to fall, have in many cases not industrialised and yet still progressed through the DTM. Countries that have faced HIV/Aids may have moved backwards through the DTM, but some believe they have jumped forwards to stage 5, missing many stages in doing so. This evidence conclusively proves that it is possible to reach the same end in a multiple of ways.
In conclusion, the DTM, provides a framework for looking back at demographical change in Europe and the US, and can often be useful when utilised in this way. However, when applied to countries that are still developing it has very limited use. It cannot be used for countries that are growing as a result of immigration as it does not account for this, this adds to the idea that the DTM cannot be used as a general tool for all countries. An unforeseen lethal disease renders it useless. Not all countries choose to industrialise which means that their demographic transition will either stay in stage 1 or the countries will import the factors needed to progress, hence still not following the model though still, possibly, reaching the same end. Also it could be argued that countries in Europe and the US are still developing and we have no data available to make projections about our future.
The tool is not entirely obsolete, it can be used to look at the past, but has limited use for the future, though it must be said that with any model a demographer could not hope to make predictions but merely projections. It seems likely that as more data is made available for the demographic change of countries outside of the western world, the DTM will have to be added to and changed, or maybe a new one will have to be formulated to work beside the old one, to compensate for the limitations that must be present in all models.
