POPULATION GROWTH

&ECONOMIC D
The central issue of our time may well turn out to be how the world addresses the
problem of ever-expanding human numbers. —James Grant, former director general,
UNICEF
Economic development may be far from “the best contraceptive,” but social development
— especially women’s education and employment—can be very effective indeed.
CONTI…
• In 2009, the world’s population was estimated to be
6.8 billion people. Projections by the United Nations
placed the figure at more than 9.2 billion by the year
2050 (another widely cited projection is higher, at 9.5
billion).
CONTI…
• The overwhelming majority of that population will
inhabit the developing world. What will be the
economic and social implications for development if
such projections are realized? Is this scenario
inevitable, or will it depend on the success or failure
of development efforts?
CONTI…
• Finally, even more significant, is rapid population
growth per se as serious a problem as many people
believe, or is it a manifestation of more fundamental
problems of underdevelopment and the unequal
utilization of global resources between rich and poor
nations, as others argue?
CONTI…
• In this chapter, we examine many of the issues
relating population growth to economic development.
We begin, however, by looking at historical and recent
population trends and the changing geographic
distribution of the world’s people.
CONTI….
• After explaining basic demographic concepts, we
present some well-known economic models and
hypotheses regarding the causes and consequences of
rapid population growth in contemporary developing
countries.
How does development affect
population growth?
• Will developing countries be capable of improving the
levels of living for their people with the current and
anticipated levels of population growth? To what
extent does rapid population increase make it more
difficult to provide essential social services, including
housing, transport, sanitation, and security
CONTI…
• How will the developing countries be able to cope
with the vast increases in their labor forces over the
coming decades? Will employment opportunities be
plentiful, or will unemployment levels soar?
CONTI…
• What are the implications of higher population
growth rates among the world’s poor for their chances
of overcoming the human misery of absolute poverty?
Will world food supply and its distribution be
sufficient not only to meet the anticipated population
increase in the coming decades but also to improve
nutritional levels to the point where all humans can
have an adequate diet?
CONTI….
• Will developing countries be able to extend the
coverage and improve the quality of their health and
educational systems so that everyone can have access
to adequate health care and a basic education?
CONTI…
• Is there a relationship between poverty and family
size?
• Is the inexorable pursuit of increasing affluence
among the rich more detrimental to the global
environment and to rising living standards among the
poor than the absolute increase in their numbers?
World Population Growth
throughout History
• As this book goes to press, the world is approaching
the population milestone of seven billion people. For
most of human existence on earth, humanity’s
numbers have been few.
CONTI…
• When people first started to cultivate food through
agriculture some 12,000 years ago, the estimated
world population was no more than 5 million . Two
thousand years ago, world population had grown to
nearly 250 million, less than a fifth of the population
of China today
CONTI…
• From year 1 on our calendar to the beginning of the
Industrial Revolution around 1750, it tripled to 728
million people, less than three-quarters of the total
number living in India today. During the next 200
years (1750–1950), an additional 1.7 billion people
were added to the planet’s numbers.
The Malthusian Population Trap
• More than two centuries ago, the Reverend Thomas Malthus
put forward a theory of the relationship between population
growth and economic development that is influential today.
Writing in his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population and
drawing on the concept of diminishing returns, Malthus
postulated a universal tendency for the population of a
country, unless checked by dwindling food supplies, to grow
at a geometric rate, doubling every 30 to 40 years.
• At the same time, because of diminishing returns to the fixed factor,
land, food supplies could expand only at a roughly arithmetic rate. In
fact, as each member of the population would have less land to work,
his or her marginal contribution to food production would actually
start to decline. Because the growth in food supplies could not keep
pace with the burgeoning population, per capita incomes (defined in
an agrarian society simply as per capita food production) would have
a tendency to fall so low as to lead to a stable population existing
barely at or slightly above the subsistence level.
CONTI…
• Malthus therefore contended that the only way to
avoid this condition of chronic low levels of living or
absolute poverty was for people to engage in “moral
restraint” and limit the number of their progeny.
Hence we might regard Malthus, indirectly and
inadvertently, as the father of the modern birth
control movement
• Modern economists have given a name to the
Malthusian idea of a population inexorably forced to
live at subsistence levels of income. They have called
it the low-level equilibrium population trap or, more
simply, the Malthusian population trap.
Criticisms of the Malthusian
Model
• The Malthusian population trap provides a theory of
the relationship between population growth and
economic development. Unfortunately, it is based on
a number of simplistic assumptions and hypotheses
that do not stand the test of empirical verification. We
can criticize the population trap on two major
grounds.
• First, the model ignores the enormous impact of
technological progress in offsetting the growth-inhibiting
forces of rapid population increases. The history of modern
economic growth has been closely associated with rapid
technological progress in the form of a continuous series of
scientific, technological, and social inventions and
innovations. Increasing rather than decreasing returns to
scale have been a distinguishing feature of the modern
growth epoch
• While Malthus was basically correct in assuming a
limited supply of land, he did not—and in fairness
could not at that time— anticipate the manner in
which technological progress could augment the
availability of land by raising its quality (its
productivity) even though its quantity might remain
roughly the same.
• In terms of the population trap, rapid and continuing
technological progress can be represented by an
upward shift of the income growth (total product)
curve so that at all levels of per capita income it is
vertically higher than the population growth curve.
This is shown in Figure 6.8. As a result, per capita
income will continue to grow over time. All countries
therefore have the potential of escaping the
Malthusian population trap.
• The second basic criticism of the trap focuses on its
assumption that national rates of population increase are
directly (positively) related to the level of national per capita
income. According to this assumption, at relatively low levels
of per capita income, we should expect to find population
growth rates increasing with increasing per capita income.
But research indicates that there appears to be no clear
correlation between population growth rates and levels of
per capita income.
• As a result of modern medicine and public health
programs, death rates have fallen rapidly and have
become less dependent on the level of per capita
income. Moreover, birth rates seem to show no rigid
relationship with per capita income levels.
• Fertility rates vary widely for countries with the same
per capita income, especially below $1,000. It is not
so much the aggregate level of per capita income that
matters for population growth but rather how that
income is distributed. It is the level of household
income, not the level of per capita income, that seems
to matter most.
• In sum, Malthusian and neo-Malthusian theories as
applied to contemporary developing nations have
severely limited relevance for the following reasons:
• They do not take adequate account of the role and
impact of technological progress.
• They are based on a hypothesis about a macro
relationship between population growth and levels of
per capita income that does not stand up to empirical
testing of the modern period.
• They focus on the wrong variable, per capita income,
as the principal determinant of population growth
rates. A much better and more valid approach to the
question of population and development centers on
the microeconomics of family size decision making in
which individual, and not aggregate, levels of living
become the principal determinant of a family’s
decision to have more or fewer children.
• We continue to study the Malthusian trap even
though evidence shows that it is not currently
relevant for three main reasons: First, because many
people still believe it holds in poor countries today,
despite the recent evidence; and people working in
the development field should understand the model
and the elements of it that do not currently apply so
that they can engage the debate effectively.
• Second, because it seems clear that such traps have
occurred in the historical past and may have been
factors in population collapses including in the pre-
Columbian Americas
CONTI…
• Third—as we will explore in the remainder of this
chapter—the fact that this model no longer applies
underlines the importance of factors that can prevent
its emergence. These include efforts to continue
steady and sustainable rises in agricultural
productivity; moreover, they encompass increases in
women’s empowerment and freedom to choose—
along with their incomes—which reduce the old-age
security motive behind high fertility