Economic Growth and Development

to about 1.1 per cent per annum by 2014. Scholars now realize that popula-
tion growth can be good or bad depending on the context in which it occurs.
The optimistic work of Ester Boserup challenges the pessimism of Paul
Erhlich.
This chapter examines how population growth affects economic growth and
how the latter affects fertility and mortality (the demographic transition). Of all
the chapters in this book (except perhaps Chapter 6 on education and health)
this chapter is the one where economic issues (growth) are mostly tightly
bound up with broader issues of human development (fertility and mortality).
The chapter concludes with a discussion of government policy related to
demography using insights derived from a catastrophic but often forgotten
form of mortality, that of ‘missing women’.

Population and economic growth

Population growth, by supplying a potential labour force, is a proximate deter-
minant of growth. Higher fertility increases (with a delay) entrants to the
labour force whilst declining mortality reduces exits. The links between popu-
lation and economic growth are shown in Figure 4.1.

80 Sources of Growth in the Modern World Economy since 1950

Box 4.1 Malthus and population catastrophe

Thomas Malthus wrote ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population’ in 1798. He

argued that population growth and economic change were essentially unre-

lated. Economic output (then principally agriculture) would increase arith-

metically (so many extra tonnes of corn per year) and population

geometrically (so many percentage points per year). Population would thus

outstrip food supply and cause famine. The resulting rise in mortality (termed

by Malthus a ‘positive check’ on population) would restore food supply per

capita. More food would stimulate fertility and the growth of population

would resume. This periodic lurch into hunger crises, he argued, could only

be prevented by a rise in the age of marriage to slow the rate of population

growth (a ‘preventive check’). Malthus didn’t anticipate the impact of the

Industrial Revolution, the beginnings of which many scholars have dated to

his era. The application of industrial-scientific principles to agriculture

enabled ‘a vast increase in output which enabled British farming in the 1830s

to supply 98 per cent of the grain for a population between two and three

times the mid-eighteenth century size’(Hobsbawm, 1995:48). Malthus also

failed to see that population and the economy were intimately linked.

Population growth could have negative, but also positive, impacts on

economic growth.