Population and Economic Growth

Abstract

Although rapid population growth is now seen primarily as a ‘problem’ in non-Western societies, two hundred years ago the West too was concerned with it. One of the most famous commentators was an English parson, Thomas Malthus (later professor at the East India College at Haileybury), who in 1798 published an ‘Essay on the Principle of Population’. The essay won immediate acclaim and was a focus of controversy for the next thirty or forty years. Malthus’s basic position is contained in the extract printed here. It was a pessimistic one, reminiscent of much that is being said at the present day. How far it is applicable to contemporary developments is taken up by Hla Myint in a chapter reprinted below from his book ‘The Economics of Developing Countries’.