Population and Development

Abstract

The relation between population growth and economic development is a complex one, and the historical quantitative evidence is ambiguous, particularly concerning what is cause and what is effect. Does economic development precede population growth, or is population growth a necessary condition for economic development to take place? Is population growth an impediment or a stimulus to economic development? Many people consider rapid population growth in the Third World to be a major obstacle to development, yet there are many ways in which population growth may be a stimulus to progress, and there are many rational reasons why families in developing countries choose to have many children. The complexity of the subject is compounded by the fact that, as we saw in Chapter 1, economic development is a multi-dimensional concept, and if the measure of development is to be translated into a measure of welfare, there are also complex philosophic questions involved relating to the meaning of welfare maximisation and the concept of an optimum population which has preoccupied welfare economists for centuries. If it could be shown, for example, that slower population growth leads to a higher rate of growth of per capita income, or fewer people means higher living standards, would this mean that if society adopted successful policies of population control it would be better off? The utilitarian approach to welfare would say not necessarily. The utilitarian adopts a total welfare criterion, as Sidgwick did in his Methods of Ethics (1907):

if the additional population enjoy on the whole positive happiness, we ought to weigh the amount of happiness gained by the extra number against the amount lost by the remainder. So that, strictly conceived, the point up to which, on utilitarian principles, population ought to be encouraged to increase is not that at which average [emphasis added] happiness is the greatest possible — as appears to be often assumed by political economists of the school of Malthus — but at which the product formed by multiplying the number of persons living into the amount of average happiness reaches its maximum.