This was however, reversed in the 1950s and underdevelopment was seen as the problem and population control as the solution. Coale and Hoover argued that rapid population growth reduced the share of resources devoted to saving and investment, causing a reduction in economic growth. As a result the 60s saw the emergence of population policy as an integral part of development ideology. The theory over the relationship was rethought and expanded and by the end of the 70s rapid population growth was believed to be a problem for income distribution rather than development, and a question of redistribution of resources by the end of the 80s. Today the focus is on high population as a hindrance to development and present policy and aims are geared toward population control. But there is a question over whether this conclusion is justified.
High rates of population growth is believed to cause poverty, low standard of living, disease, poor health, social problems, famine and even environmental degradation and ecological disaster. Many texts refer to the problem as the ‘population bomb’ because of these causes and its hindrance to development. The fact is that the greater the population the greater the demand for resources, consequently resources per capita fall. The more people there are the more government’s revenues are drained, reducing prospects and opportunities for any improvements for the existing generation, clearly hindering development. This is the Neo-Malthusian view, that increases in population leads to a depression of wages resulting in lower standards of living for the employed. With the ‘Law of Population’ theory that “population grows in geometric progression, while food resources increase by only an arithmetic progression resulting in a disequilibria between population growth and food production” (Aydin 2001). In addition to this the growing population in the underdeveloped world is increasingly made up of dependant children, in fact “children under age 15 make up 40% of total population” that’s compared to 23% in the developed world and “in most developing countries the active labour force has to support proportionally twice as many children as it does in richer countries” (Todaro 1989:38). It is not just the fact that these children cannot earn a living and therefore depend on their parents, but they also draw on education and health revenues. This enormous dependency burden coupled with large population and underdevelopment make development impossible where rates of improvement are lower than the growth in population.
There are several arguments, though, that insist high population growth does not hinder development. Firstly there is the argument that high population growth is a consequence of underdevelopment not a hindrance to development. It is believed that high rates of birth in the developing world are due to the added social security of a large family. In the developed world birth rates are lower because the social security offered by development have given developed nations the freedom to have small families. The social securities surrounding a large family in the third world include greater household income when the children begin working, also the guarantee of a number of children surviving the high infant mortality rates that come with underdevelopment. The idea is that if development occurred the growth in population is likely to slow, so it is the lack of development that hindering further development and population control.
The second argument is that of poor distribution of resources. Developed countries consume almost 80% of the world’s resources, using up to as much as 16 times more food, energy and material resources. The dispute is that the developed world should reduce their ridiculously high consumption of resources to free some up for the developing nations, rather than asking them to restrict the number of people demanding resources.
Another contention is that it is not a question of high population growth but of population distribution. High concentrations of poor people in small areas are the problem. Todaro believes governments should try to reduce rural to urban migration to generate a more natural spatial distribution of the population in terms of available land and resources. For example there are parts of sub-Saharan Africa that are unpopulated or under populated in relation to the amount of unused land and available and potential resources. “Many rural regions in developing countries are in reality under populated in the sense that much unused but arable land could yield large increases in agricultural output if only more people were available to cultivate it” (Todaro, 1989:205). This quote even goes so far as to suggest that population growth is desirable. That a rise in population causes an increase in consumer demand which in turn helps to lower production costs.
Todaro also writes in his book ‘Economic Development In The Third World’, that the issue of high population growth being a hindrance to development as deliberately contrived and false. He believes that the developed world’s concern over population growth in the third world is really “an attempt by the former to hold down the development of the latter in order to maintain an international status quo that is favourable to their self interests” (Todaro, 1989:204)
It is very difficult to say for certain whether or not high population growth is indeed a hindrance to development. Economists, demographers and politicians have argued it about it for nearly a century now. My view is in line with that of Robinson, in that there are other influences not mentioned in this view that are at work “experience shows that it is nit so much the economic shortages but the entire institutional, social and psychological setting in which they occur, that stands like a giant in the way of long term economic growth” (Robinson, 1971:40)
Bibliography
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Allen and Thomas, Poverty and Development in the 1990s, 1992, Oxford University Press, Oxford
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Furedi F, Population and Development: A Critical Introduction, 1997, Blackwell Publishers Ltd., Oxford
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Robinson R, Developing the Third World, Cambridge University Press, London
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Todaro M P, Economic Development In The Third World, 1989, New York, USA
