Chapter 4
Population and Economic Growth/
Development
Many people assume that investment is always and everywhere a good thing;
the opposite assumption is often made for population growth. A tabloid news-
paper reported in late 2013 that the ‘UK population could DOUBLE to
131 million within a century’. Two-thirds of this increase, it suggested, would
result from immigrants and their children. Looking at a longer time span
makes the numbers certainly look less dramatic. The population of the earth
took 10,000 years to increase from 5 million to 730 million in 1750. Over the
next two hundred years the total increased to 3 billion, then doubled again to
6.4 billion in 2000. Current forecasts suggest that the population will peak at
11–12 billion in 2100, and that 90 per cent of the increase will take place in
current developing countries. By 2050 the population of Pakistan, for exam-
ple, is forecast to increase from 160 million to 340 million and India from 1
billion to 1.6 billion. As a proportion of the global total the population of
Europe is expected to decline from 12 to 7 per cent and Africa to rise from 13
to 22 per cent.
Thomas Malthus (see Box 4.1) predicted that untrammelled population
growth would bring social and environmental catastrophe.
In the late 1960s a book by Paul Erhlich entitled The Population Bomb
(1968) forecast that the 1970s would be characterized by global mass star-
vation and the food surplus countries (particularly the US, Canada and
Australia) would face the appalling choice of who to save. The disaster
never came. Since Ehrlich’s book was published the population of the world
has doubled and the incidence of famine has declined sharply. Ehrlich
missed the impact of science applied to agriculture. During the Green
Revolution of the mid-1960s higher yield crop varieties were developed and
agricultural inputs such as fertilizer, pesticide and irrigation were improved.
These changes enabled a sustained growth of agricultural output based on
improving the productivity (yield) of land so freeing food production from
a dependence on without bringing ever more land into cultivation. It wasn’t
just luck that saved us from global starvation. There appears to be a system-
atic relation between economic and population growth, whereby economic
growth first increases, then slows the rate of population growth. This is
known as the demographic transition. The rate of world population growth
has been slowing decreasing since the 1960s, falling from about 2 per cent
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