FRQSC grant awarded to Prof. Isabel Pike

The FRQSC has awarded Isabel Pike, Assistant Professor in McGill’s Department of Sociology , a research grant through their Research Support for New Academics competition.

The grant spans three years and will go towards Pike’s project “The Demographic Dividend and the Re-Economization of Population.”

Originally put forward by American economists in the 1990s, the demographic dividend has become a prominent concept in the population and development policy. The central idea is that as fertility rates begin to decline, a working-age bulge forms, yielding a potential economic boost.

With the support of this grant, Pike, along with student research assistants, will examine how the demographic dividend moved from academia to policy as well as from the US to the global stage. In doing so, it will examine how policy actors use the demographic dividend alongside other key frames in the population and development arena, such as reproductive health. The primary methods of the project will be textual analysis and in-depth interviews.