ESPSE-C06 Population Growth and Development

EDPSE-C06 Population Growth and Development §

• The rate of population change is strongly influenced by effects of anything that resulted in high and fluctuating death rates

  • Famine, disease, malnutrition, plague, war

• Population growth today comes from rapid transition

  • from era with high birth and death rates
  • to era with death rates sharply fallen, but birth rates not falling much in developing countries

How world’s population is distributed by geographic region, fertility/mortality levels, & age structures? §

Geographically §

• 3/4 of the world live in developing countries
• 1/4 of the world live in economically developed countries

Fertility and Mortality §

• Rate of population increase = % Yearly Net Relative Increase in population size from
  • Natural increase: how much births over deaths
    • Natural increase(+-) = Births - Deaths
    • The most influential variable in population increase
  • Net International Migration: people moving to live in other parts of the world. Recently more important measure of population growth
• Child mortality dropped
  • Developing countries have lower life-expectancy and higher birth rates than developed countries
    • => Population of developed country is on average older than developing ones
• Depends on healthcare quality

Age Structure and Dependency Burdens §

• 30% of developing population are under 15 years old

• 17% of developed populations are under 15 years old

• Youth Dependency Ratio = $\frac{\text{Youths}}{\text{Economically Active Adults}}$

  • It’s very high for developing countries
  • Smaller workforce supporting larger numbers of children

Hidden Momentum of Population Growth §

1. Birth rates takes decades to slow down
2. Age Structure
   • Developed countries allow women to delay birthing to later in life
   • Developing countries, young outnumber their parents
     • when they have kids on their own
     • there will be huge increase in birth rates before going back down

• The Demographic Transition: explains how developed countries go through the same 3 stages of population growth

  1. Very stable and slow population growth due to high birth rates and high mortality rates

  2. Boom in popluation growth: beginning of demographic transition

     • Lowering of mortality rates due to modern medicine/health
     • Raising life-expectancy from 40 -> 60
     • Not immediate slow of birth rates

     Note

     1950-1960s developing countries reached stage two, importing western medicine

  3. Little or no population growth due to forces and influence of modernizatio nand development

     • The slowing of birth rates to the same as mortality rate
     • For developing countries it might either
       • lowers mortality rates extremely,
       • or only a little bit due to absolute poverty, low levels of living, AIDS
     • Still high population growth due to need of high birth rates still

The Cause of High Fertility in Developing Countries §

The Malthusian Poplulation Trap §

• Malthus said: Its a universal tendency for a population, unless slowed by dwindling food supplies, would double every 30-40 years.
  • As growth of supplies is linear (not exponential), land, food, jobs would decline
    • Poverty positively correlated with population growth rate. => Malthus Population Trap: Stable population existing barely at or slightly above surviving level

not enough resources to provide for population growth -> lower birth rate back

• Solutions

  • Malthus said to avoid this is for people engage in “moral restraint” by limiting how many kids they have
  • Technologica Progress: that shifts income growth rate curve up
    • It might change economic institutions and culture (“social progress”) to shift population growth curve down (people having less kids due to low mortality)

• Criticism: Malthusian and neo-Malthusian theories as applied to contemporary developing nations have severely limited relevance for the following reasons:

  1. They do not take adequate account of the role and impact of technological progress.
  2. 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.
  3. 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

The Microeconomic Household Theory of Fertility §

• It assumes Child is a commodity with demand $C_d=f(Y,P_c,P_x,t_x),x=1,...,n$

Note

• $\partial C_d/\partial Y>0$: The higher the household income, the greater the demand for children.
• $\partial C_d/\partial P_c>0$: The higher the net price of children, the lower the quantity demanded.
• $\partial C_d/\partial P_x>0$: The higher the prices of all other goods relative to children, the greater the quantity of children demanded.
• $\partial C_d/\partial t_x>0$: The greater the strength of tastes for goods relative to children, the fewer children demanded.

Demand for Children §

• Children are seen as economic commodity in poorer nations

  • Investments that will benefit in the future

• Expected some not to survive, families have more children than demanded

• The demand for additional children depends on

  • The cost of raising: Education, Use of mother’s time over working for income
  • The future benefits: Child Labor, Job opportunities for young people
  • As women are educated, they want less children,
    • they earn larger share of income, they have decision making power in marriage
  • As parents are educated and nutrience and child programs are developed
    • first borns are more likely to survive
    • reducing opportunity cost, meaning they have less children to prepare for child death

• Social and Economic Progress will lead to lower fertility rates

  • Education for Women
  • Increase in female non-agricultural wage & employment opportunities
  • Increase of family income??????
  • Decrease in infant mortality
  • Development of old age and social security programs to make parents rely less on children in old age
  • Better education for children -> Quality child > Quantity children

Debates on whether or not rapid population growth is a cause for concern §

• It is not a concern because

  • Dependency Theory The argument of population growth being an issue is created by the rich to keep developing countries dependent on the rich. These are the issues instead of population growth
    1. Underdevelopment should be the only goal, economic and social progress will come after alongside population growth.
       • Birth control programs will fail because there is more incentive to have more children because lack of development
    2. World Resource Depletion and Environmental Destruction:
       • Developed countries consume 80% of the world’s resources. 1 more developed country child = many under-developed country child
       • Instead of the under-developed having less children, the developed should consume less resources
    3. Population Distribution: government should space out people and share resources between the population better since cities are cramped and dense for no reason.
    4. Women’s inferior roles, low status and restricted access to birth control in society makes women have more births
  • Population growth is essential to economic development

• Key terms

  • Doubling time: the period that a population doubles in size.
  • Net international migration: The excess of persons migrating into a country over those who emigrate from that country.
  • Crude birth rate: The number of children born alive each year per 1,000 population
    • (often shortened to birth rate).
  • Death rate: The number of deaths each year per 1,000 population.
  • Total fertility rate (TFR): The number of children that would be born to a woman if she were to live to the end of her childbearing years and bear children in accordance with the prevailing age specific fertility rates.
  • Natural increase: The difference between the birth rate and the death rate of a given population.
  • Rate of population increase: The growth rate of a population, calculated as the natural increase after adjusting for immigration and emigration
  • Life expectancy at birth: The number of years a newborn child would live if subject to the mortality risks prevailing for the population at the time of the child’s birth.
  • Under-5 mortality rate: Deaths among children between birth and 5 years of age per 1,000 live births
  • Youth dependency ratio: The proportion of young people under age 15 to the working population aged 16 to 64 in a country.
  • Hidden momentum of population growth: The phenomenon whereby population continues to increase even after a fall in birth rates because the large existing youthful population expands the population’s base of potential parents
  • Population pyramid: A graphic depiction of the age structure of the population, with age cohorts plotted on the vertical axis and either population shares or numbers of males and females in each cohort on the horizontal axis.
  • Demographic transition: The phasing-out process of population growth rates from a virtually stagnant growth stage characterized by high birth rates and death rates through a rapid-growth stage with high birth rates and low death rates to a stable, low growth stage in which both birth and death rates are low.
  • Malthusian population trap: The threshold population level anticipated by Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) at which population increase was bound to stop because life sustaining resources, which increase at an arithmetic rate, would be insufficient to support human population, which increases at a geometric rate
  • Microeconomic theory of fertility: The theory that family formation has costs and benefits that determine the size of families formed.
  • Family-planning programs: Public programs designed to help parents plan and regulate their family size
  • Population-poverty cycle: A theory to explain how poverty and high population growth become reinforcing.
  • Reproductive choice: The concept that women should be able to determine on an equal status with their husbands and for themselves how many children they want and what methods to use to achieve their desired family size.