why Minerals and industries are treated as important economic factor for affecting the distribution of population is explain
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Explanation:Economists, demographers and other social scientists have long debated the relationship between demographic change and economic outcomes. In recent years, general agreement has emerged to the effect that improving economic conditions for individuals generally lead to lower birth rates. But, there is much less agreement about the proposition that lower birth rates contribute to economic development and help individuals and families to escape from poverty. The paper examines recent evidence on this aspect of the debate, concludes that the burden of evidence now increasingly supports a positive conclusion, examines recent trends in demographic change and economic development and argues that the countries representing the last development frontier, those of Sub-Saharan Africa, would be well advised to incorporate policies and programmes to reduce high fertility in their economic development strategies.
Keywords: economic development, family planning, millennium development goals, population, poverty
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1. INTRODUCTION
From the time of Malthus onwards, economists, demographers and other social scientists have been debating whether and how high fertility and rapid population growth affect economic outcomes and vice versa. There are at least four basic forms of the debate.
Does a large number of children diminish a family's present well being and future prospects?
Does rapid population growth adversely affect the overall performance of the economy and its ability to achieve and sustain general well being?
Does low income, or poverty, contribute to high fertility?
Is rapid population growth a symptom, rather than a cause, of low national output and poor economic performance?
In other words, the debates occur at both the macro- and the micro-levels and are about the direction of causality.
Despite these debates, a broad consensus has developed over time that as incomes rise, fertility tends to fall. There is little debate about the causal relationship between rising prosperity and declining fertility. Generally speaking, there has been a uniformly high correlation between national income growth and falling birth rates, and between family incomes and fertility. Economists and demographers for the most part agree that important ingredients of improved living standards, such as urbanization, industrialization and rising opportunities for non-agrarian employment, improved educational levels, and better health all lead to changed parental perceptions of the costs and benefits of children, leading in turn to lower fertility. In other words, there is no longer much debate about whether or not improved economic conditions, whether at the family level or at the societal level, lead to lower fertility. There are, of course, important differences between countries, and even within countries, regarding the timing and the pace of these changes, but that there is a causal relationship running from improved living standards to lower fertility is no longer in much dispute (National Research Council 1986).
Where debate remains active and at times quite contentious has to do with whether causality runs the other way—i.e. does reduced fertility improve the economic prospects of families and societies? Here there is anything but consensus, although, as I will argue in this paper, there appears to be a slowly growing convergence of views in favour of an affirmative answer to this question. This paper, in other words, addresses the question of whether reduced fertility, and more particularly public policies designed to reduce fertility, can lead to higher incomes and improved living standards.
A good deal of research, of course, has been conducted on this question. The paper attempts to summarize the present state of such research and the conclusions that emerge from it today. My purpose is to try to identify what policymakers can conclude from the present state of research and then to speculate on what might be accomplished between now and 2050 if policymakers were to pursue what I take to be the course of action suggested by the research findings.
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2. WHAT DO WE KNOW—MACRO?
Through the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, intellectuals were roughly divided between the followers of Malthus and the followers of Marx. Crudely stated, Malthusians believed that high rates of population growth condemned societies to more or less permanent states of underdevelopment and that only by breaking the iron linkage of high fertility to poverty could real improvements in standards of living be achieved. Marx, on the other hand, argued that high fertility was a symptom, not a cause, of poverty and said that only by bringing about a radical transformation in the underlying causes of poverty would living standards rise and birth rates begin to fall.