Economics and Demography (Routledge Revivals)

Ian Bowen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136447983
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Économie
• Subtopic: Économie du travail

First published in 1976, Economics and Demography discusses how the world population doubled in the thirty years prior to its publication, and considers the economic implications of this demographic transformation.

Professor Bowen, with many years' experience of research into the economic and statistical aspects of population and world development, provides a survey of the population of the world, and of how political economists have explained population growth. The author's survey looks first at the mechanisms of growth – fertility, mortality, and migration – followed by an account of theories of growth from Adam Smith to the present day. Professor Bowen, a former fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, who taught at universities in England, America, Australia and Asia, writes from the point of view of a political economist rather than a demographer, and Economics and Demography is of particular value to students of development, development economics and demography within departments of economics, economic history and geography.

PART I THE DEMOGRAPHIC OUTLOOK

Introduction

The Current Scene

In round numbers the total population of the world was 2·5 billions in 1950, 3·0 in 1960, 3·6 in 1970, and may reach 6·4 (or more) by the year 2000.¹ Between 1950 and 1975 there was an increase of some 60 per cent, and currently the annual rate of increase is nearly 2 per cent, an increase of about 80 millions a year.

Demographers have been crying wolf too often for such figures to have the impact of news. But an 80 million a year increase, estimated for the mid-1970s, is considerably greater than the 60 million a year average for 1960 to 1969, or for 1950 to 1975. The annual rate of increase rose from 0·8 per cent for the 1900 to 1950 period, to 1·8 per cent for 1950 to 1960, then to 1·9 per cent in the next decade, and may soon exceed 2 per cent.

At current rates, world population would double in 37 years. Even if, as is expected, the rate of increase slackens before the end of the twentieth century, it is still expected to remain positive, and the annual increase will grow in absolute numbers. Barring inflexions in the growth curve as a result of world disasters, the momentum of growth will carry numbers higher for decades to come.

The increase in population is distributed most unevenly among the different regions of the world, as can be seen from the accompanying map (p. 142). The more developed regions grew from 1960 to 1970 at a relatively moderate average annual rate – at about 1 per cent a year. The underdeveloped areas, on the other hand, in which some two thirds of the world’s population lived in 1960, were growing at twice that rate. The result, if this differential persists, will be that the more developed regions will increase their population by about 35 per cent by the year 2000, while the less developed regions will double theirs.

This simple dichotomy, a two-way split of world population between rich and poor, developed and ‘less developed’, has strong political as well as economic implications. A shift in power relationships is one probable implication of such a discrepancy, but it is not clear how these changes can be smoothly accommodated. For it is, on the whole, the developed regions in which surplus supplies of food can be produced, and the less developed that suffer the worst food shortages.

Population (in millions)

		2000	Increase 1970–2000
	1970	Projected	Nos	%
South Asia	1126	2384	1258	111·7
East Asia	930	1373	443	47·6
Africa	344	834	490	142·4
Latin America	283	625	342	120·8
Above four areas	2683	5216	2533	94·4
Europe	462	540	78	16·9
USSR	243	321	78	32·1
North America	228	296	68	29·8
Above three areas	933	1157	224	24·0
World	3632	6406	2774	76·4

Source: United Nations, The World Population Situation in 1970–1975 (New York, NY, 1974), Tables 16 and 23.

The main factor that has caused population to expand so fast since 1900 has been the same as in the nineteenth century – a continuing improvement in the conditions of mortality. World average life expectancy is believed to have gained 20 years between 1935–9 and 1965–70. Life expectation was about 55 years in 1970 on average, ranging from 70 or more in the more developed regions down to 40 (or a bit less) in the less developed.

In the more developed countries mortality has declined so far that there is a very high chance of survival to age 50 for the average female child born alive (94 per cent in the case of Sweden by the period 1961–5, for example). For such populations, further lengthening of the life span adds little or nothing to their reproductive potential. In less developed areas, because there are still wide differences in life expectations and therefore greater potential for improvement, bettering conditions of life could well stimulate reproduction.

This is one reason why it is difficult to predict how soon the reduced fertility, eventually to be expected once mortality has declined, may come; perhaps not as quickly as would be necessary to remove the dangers of over-rapid growth. The transition from a high fertility to a low fertility situation was fairly consistent in the so-called ‘developed’ countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But in the early days of their industrialisation these countries too had varying periods of very rapid population growth owing to declining mortality. One key question today is how to shorten a similar transition process for the developing countries.

Countries with low fertility have arrived at this situation usually through widespread rejection of the responsibility of bringing up large families. This has taken the form of social changes, such as increased celibacy, later average age at marriage, or reduced completed family size. In Singapore, for example, there was a drop in fertility between 1957 and 1966 of some 35 per cent, due in nearly equal proportion to decreasing prevalence of (age specific) marriage, and to decreasing marital fertility. The upsurge of marriage in Europe, North America and European-settled Oceania in the 1940s and 1950s (where average age at marriage declined by two or three years) was one reason for the well-known baby boom of that period.

Fertility is still high – with birth rates of 30 per 1000 and more – in a great swathe of countries across the atlas, from Mexico, Paraguay and Brazil in the west, to China, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea in the east. Argentina, Australia and Chile have rates of between 21 and 25, and almost all the rest of the world (apart from Portugal, Ireland and Iceland) have rates of only 16 to 18. How can all the countries of Africa, and most of those of Asia and Latin America, continue with their high rates without a disaster? For roughly the same countries that show high birth rates also have high population growth rates.

Death rates are distributed rather differently. Africa as a whole shows relatively high death rates – at least 10 per 1000 with a sprinkling of 20 or more in the most primitive economies – and so does the whole of Asia except Thailand. But for most of Latin America the death rate is below 10, as it is also in Australia, Chile, the Argentine, the Soviet Union and Spain. Low death rates may be brought about as a result of a relatively young population, and per contra the somewhat higher rates, ranging from 10 to 13 per 1000, in western and northern European countries can be accounted for by the greater average age of their populations. The fact is, however, that the relatively high death rates of the more backward developing regions have every chance of being much reduced.

Since the world’s population has grown, and is growing, so fast largely because of declining mortality (itself the ultimate index of distress), there might not seem to be any reason for alarm or dismay. There are two main time perspectives to consider: first, the short or medium term – what are going to be the pressures arising from population growth over the next 25 years; and secondly, the long-term perspective of likely events over the next century and beyond. This distinction should always be kept in mind in discussions of future population change.

The decline of mortality is encouraging, but how long will it continue? This matter will be looked at in more detail in the chapters that follow, but it is as well to recognise at the outset that there are commonly supposed to be two major sources of danger – from growing density of population, especially in cities, and from difficulties in increasing the supply of food. These two threats, if they become reality, may reverse the downward trend in mortality. Some experts would point to evidence that in the short-term outlook both factors are already at work. As for the long term, pessimists would argue that there are finite physical limits to the means for offsetting overcrowding, with its catastrophic consequences, or for expanding and distributing a world supply of food sufficient to maintain health for an ever-increasing number of people.

The argument against overcrowding rests partly on analogies with the behaviour of animals, and partly on what is taken to be supporting evidence from studies of slums and other congested human conditions. There are two parts to this argument: the first relates to changes in the environment, an issue best treated separately; and the second to changes in the human being that arise from sheer space limitations. Studies of overcrowding of animals, lemmings for instance, show that when it occurs the animals die off in droves because of shock. They begin to die, it seems, from slight injuries, or from ‘their great excitement’, as one witness put it, or because of an internal complaint, like atrophy of the liver. Shock disease is supposed to have afflicted armies, submarine crews, prisoners of war or occupants of concentration camps, because of the particular mixture of overcrowding and limited activities that such groups have had to endure.

Norman Borlaug, inventor of the ‘Green Revolution’, in his Nobel prize-receiving speech, is said to have referred to the ‘destructive physical consequences of the grotesque concentration of human beings into the poisoned and clangorous environment of pathologically hypertrophied megapoles’.²

According to some social scientists,³ it is possible within certain community areas of large US cities to demonstrate a relationship between density of population, indicated by persons per room, and measures of mortality, juvenile delinquency, fertility, and public assistance. Theories of the optimum number of face-to-face contacts needed by a person each day to stimulate him, and of how much more will cause him stress, have been constructed to account for social breakdown in cities. Yet, on the most conservative estimate of world population growth, density of population will be doubled by the year 2000, reaching by then over 45 persons per square kilometre. Moreover a far higher proportion of the world’s population than now will be living in urban areas.

As for the food crisis – and one has already occurred in the 1970s – the great difficulty seen nowadays is not the simple physical capacity to produce, but the physical, economic and social problems of shifting supply. For instance, the sheer volume of grain to be shipped to the starving inhabitants of Africa and Asia in 1974 – had that grain been available – would have exceeded the amount that could have been handled by the existing ports. The economic problems would be how to get the food paid for, and how to carry out sales at concessional rates – or gifts – so as not to undermine the incentives of the farmers in the receiving countries to grow more food themselves, For these countries to increase their agricultural output, additional input is required. To double agricultural production would require a huge injection of capital, and much more than double the existing expenditure on fertilisers, agricultural research, and transport.

With help from developed countries, some of these problems may be solved, at least in some areas. But as fast as one problem is out of the way, another is liable to become acute. For example, since in developing countries agriculture employs a high proportion of the total labour force, an improvement in agricultural productivity may create an employment problem, just as the increasing use of fertilisers and pesticides may cause environmental difficulties. Because of these multiple interconnections, it would be rash to conclude from the comparative ease with which food output can be doubled or more in the developed areas of the world, that the food needs of a rising world population can easily be met. The barrier to expansion is not that the output of food cannot be doubled for physical reasons, as Malthus hypothesised must happen in the second doubling period of his model; the trouble lies elsewhere. There are social, political and organisational bottlenecks no less crippling than the once feared niggardliness of nature.

It is their own nature, and their own relationships, that human beings have to change if an ever-increasing population is to be accommodated without disaster in the next two 25-year periods. Above all, to make the mounting problems manageable, there needs to be some change in the world’s patterns of fertility. If there is not to be control of population through a rise in mortality – a programme not so far advocated by any group, though no doubt some future society may think fit to espouse it – fertility must in fact decline. There have been some encouraging signs in the statistics since the mid-1960s to suggest that in some areas at least a change of behaviour has already begun.

Donald Bogue even nominated the date of the ‘switch over’ as 1965.⁴ From then on he expected the rate of growth in world population to go down with each passing year. But by the mid-1970s it was no longer so certain that the decline had been extensive enough, or was likely to become sufficiently universal, to guarantee low population growth in the foreseeable future.

To understand population change in relation to industrial and economic growth, it is necessary to analyse mortality, fertility and migration effects, so long as limited areas of the world are being studied. But this raises two questions. Into what areas should the world be divided to obtain answers most relevant to the future on earth of mankind? Secondly, what interconnections, if any, exist between the three factors of change? Is there any mechanism whereby a society may be led to adjust its fertility and migration rates to counter problems presented by falling mortality?

Sometimes it is relevant to divide the world into ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘developed’ for purposes of population study. Sometimes, population is studied in terms of political units, a procedure justified by the national collection of statistics, and by a realistic acceptance of political organisation as it currently exists. The variety of languages, so-called cultures, and national behaviour suggest that this division is meaningful, if neither ideal nor likely to last. Almost every area of the world has had its frontiers changed substantially in the last hundred years, and presumably changes will take place in the future. The political aspects of population size and change are separate from the economic but not irrelevant to them.

Industrial growth and population change will probably themselves directly affect the political groupings that the world will fall into, or deliberately adopt. Moreover, a world view of population problems cannot really abstract from the consequences of the qualities and distribution of population throughout the world. The actual divisions have relevance to the total result.

The industrial revolution may have had its failures in population adjustment, but at least in the long run fertility fell and followed the mortality trend (see Chapter 6). The demographic picture presented in the 1960s was of a world divided into two halves: one, the developed, which had on the whole made the necessary adjustment; the other the underdeveloped, which was facing a dangerous lag period of unknown duration, during which its population might rise much faster than any likely increase in its resources.

But in the 1970s an entirely new danger had begun to be discussed at all levels – the danger of pollution. This was not a new problem. The industrial revolution had caused pollution in industrial areas on such a large scale as to require new skills to be developed to dispose of sewage and industrial effluents. Economists had noted that social costs and benefits were not identical with private.

Neither theory nor practice had disposed of these old problems, but had only introduced partial remedies and palliatives. The first industrial revolution had in fact raised all the issues. In the eighteenth century, with its relatively simple technologies and sparse populations, a capitalist society could treat the natural environment as ‘given’. Air and water were often referred to as free goods, since they were so plentiful that no price could be charged for them. An exception was made only for ‘medicinal springs’ in the European and American spas, or the ‘ozone’ at the summer seaside resorts. The huge negative results of bad ...