The US National Intelligence Council on Global Demographic Trends

摘要

Global Trends is an unclassified quadrennial report series of the US National Intelligence Council. Successive reports present broad-based speculations about world developments and their main drivers over a time horizon of a couple of decades, drawing on a wide range of US and international expertise and opinion. The most recent report, the sixth, is titled Global Trends: Paradox of Progress and was publicly released on January 9, 2017. As in prior reports (see, for example, the Documents section of PDR 39, no. 1), alternative scenarios of the world's future are constructed as a narrative device to pull together the various speculations. Three are offered, respectively emphasizing a state-level retreat from globalization, great-power competition for spheres of influence, and strengthened sub-state and transnational organizations and networks. The bulk of the report, however, comprises a more down-to-earth discussion of "trends transforming the global landscape" both in the near future (the next five years) and the "distant future" (the next 20 years) in broad domains such as population, technology, ideology, governance, and warfare. The section on demographic change, pp. 163-167 of the annex on Key Global Trends, is reproduced below. The full report is available online at the NIC's website.