This study proves new manifestations of (dis)similarity between the levels of human development and demographic behavior. The primary research question is whether the set of populations of the world’s countries behaves demographically “in accordance” with the level of their human development. This seems like a trivial demographic question that has been addressed by a lot of demographers in the last decades. However, we think that a new perspective can still be brought to the topic. It turns out that the investigated relationship is not as crystal clear as it might seem. We have developed an original index of human development. Moreover, we dealt with a set of 195 countries as well as quite a long period − from 1970 to 2020. The first key finding is that human development and demographic behavior have become increasingly similar – more than expected; roughly twice as much in 2020 as in 1970. We also investigated whether people’s affiliation with respective world region has a changing contribution to the global variety of relationship between human development and demographic behavior. The main finding is that the contributions of spatial dimensions (continents, macro-regions, countries) to mutual dissimilarity between human and demographic developments change over time.
Bleha et al. (Mon,) studied this question.