The second stage, which can be dated from around 1986, was what economist Kelley called the ‘revisionist’ period ( Kelley 1986). This movement took as a given fact that rapid population growth harmed the prospects for development and that strong policies to reduce population growth rates were an essential precondition of sustained economic development ( National Academy of Sciences 1971). While this work hardly represented a consensus among development economists, it did capture the imagination of policymakers, particularly in the richer countries, and contributed to the formation of the modern ‘population movement’ as we have known it since the 1960s. It was decidedly neo-Malthusian, arguing that only by bringing rapid population growth under control could countries hope to achieve improved economic performance and high standards of living. In the first stage, which followed the post war discovery by demographers of extremely rapidly expanding populations in many parts of the developing world, the work of scholars such as Coale & Hoover (1958), Myrdal (1968) and Enke (1970) came to be widely accepted. In the modern era, which is to say since World War II, there have been three broad stages of economic thinking on the relationship between rapid population growth and economic performance. Marx, on the other hand, argued that high fertility was a symptom, not a cause, of poverty and said that only by bringing about a radical transformation in the underlying causes of poverty would living standards rise and birth rates begin to fall. Crudely stated, Malthusians believed that high rates of population growth condemned societies to more or less permanent states of underdevelopment and that only by breaking the iron linkage of high fertility to poverty could real improvements in standards of living be achieved. Through the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, intellectuals were roughly divided between the followers of Malthus and the followers of Marx. My purpose is to try to identify what policymakers can conclude from the present state of research and then to speculate on what might be accomplished between now and 2050 if policymakers were to pursue what I take to be the course of action suggested by the research findings. The paper attempts to summarize the present state of such research and the conclusions that emerge from it today. This paper, in other words, addresses the question of whether reduced fertility, and more particularly public policies designed to reduce fertility, can lead to higher incomes and improved living standards.Ī good deal of research, of course, has been conducted on this question. does reduced fertility improve the economic prospects of families and societies? Here there is anything but consensus, although, as I will argue in this paper, there appears to be a slowly growing convergence of views in favour of an affirmative answer to this question. Where debate remains active and at times quite contentious has to do with whether causality runs the other way-i.e. There are, of course, important differences between countries, and even within countries, regarding the timing and the pace of these changes, but that there is a causal relationship running from improved living standards to lower fertility is no longer in much dispute ( National Research Council 1986). In other words, there is no longer much debate about whether or not improved economic conditions, whether at the family level or at the societal level, lead to lower fertility. Economists and demographers for the most part agree that important ingredients of improved living standards, such as urbanization, industrialization and rising opportunities for non-agrarian employment, improved educational levels, and better health all lead to changed parental perceptions of the costs and benefits of children, leading in turn to lower fertility. Generally speaking, there has been a uniformly high correlation between national income growth and falling birth rates, and between family incomes and fertility. There is little debate about the causal relationship between rising prosperity and declining fertility. In other words, the debates occur at both the macro- and the micro-levels and are about the direction of causality.ĭespite these debates, a broad consensus has developed over time that as incomes rise, fertility tends to fall. Is rapid population growth a symptom, rather than a cause, of low national output and poor economic performance?
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