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Copyright of Population & Development Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Population & Development Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article addresses central issues related to population policy and economic development. Poverty and prosperity are normally marked by boundaries. These boundaries are also the borders of countries. The familiar exchange-rate comparisons of per capita incomes often overstate international differences in standards of living, but even the best available purchasing-power-parity statistics give the richest countries per capita incomes 10 and 20 times as great as the poorest countries. The statistics also suggest that migrants from poor to rich countries normally obtain great increases in wage rates, and the persistence of the migration confirms that these increases are not statistical illusions. It was shown in this paper that the coincidences of the demarcations of poverty and prosperity with national borders, and the experiences of migrants crossing these borders, offer insights for both economists and demographers, and indeed for anyone who is anxious to alleviate poverty and hasten the progress of the less developed countries. A fresh perspective on the population problem can be achieved and even begin to uncover the key to economic development, by asking how well migration and the great differences in per capita incomes across countries are explained by diminishing returns.

Copyright of Population & Development Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article presents abstracts of papers published in the current issue of the periodical "Population and Development Review." The article " Technological Advance, Economic Growth, and the Distribution of Income," Wassily Leontief discusses changed brought about in income distribution by technological advance and economic growth in Western Europe. The article "A Century of Demographic and Cultural Change in Western Europe: An Exploration of Underlying Dimensions," by Ron Lesthaeghe focuses on recent developments in patterns of family life in Western Europe. The article "Children's Work Activities in Malaysia," by Dennis De Tray explores economic contributions that Malaysian children make to their parents while living in the parents' households. The article "On the Institutional Analysis of Population Programs," by Ruth Simmons, Gayl D. Ness, and George B. Simmons discusses the treatment of population programs in the dominant social-demographic research tradition and in the alternative tradition that derives from public administration, organization behavior, and management sciences, showing the advances and limitations of both orientations.

Reprints the paper "Uses and Limitations of International Trade in Overcoming Inequalities in World Distribution of Population and Resources," by Folke Hilgerdt, which was presented to the first post-war World Population Conference in Rome in 1954. Discussion about international disequilibrium; Utilization of modern technology in a manner permitting organic economic growth; Factors involved in the problem of international economic integration.

Copyright of Population & Development Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Population & Development Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Population & Development Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Many studies have sought to gauge the impact of population growth on economic growth. A well-known stylized fact of this literature is that the estimated effects of population growth measures on economic growth are not robust, varying between being positive, negative, and insignificantly different from zero. The present study analyzes 471 statistical regressions from 29 prominent economic growth studies using meta-regression analysis to identify the effect of alternative methodologies on key population growth results. This study finds that a broad set of methodological factors explains more than half of the variation in the population growth effects observed from this literature, including the types of variables used to measure population growth, the countries selected, the time frame of the analysis, and the nature of the control variables specified. The study also yields results that have implications for policymakers, especially insofar as several policy factors seem to influence the population change–economic growth nexus. Particularly strong is the evidence in support of the increasingly adverse effects of population growth in the post-1980 period, suggesting that demographic issues should warrant greater attention than they currently receive from the policymaking community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Population & Development Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article presents abstracts of various articles that were published in this issue of the journal "Population & Development Review. The article "Population, Development, and Planning in Brazil," examines the effects of population growth on economic growth in Brazil in terms of macroeconomic theory and in terms of related questions of formation and effective utilization of Brazil's human resource potential and relationship to income distribution. Another article "Does Illegitimacy Make a Difference? A Study of the Life Chances of Illegitimate Children in California," indicates that despite a generally more relaxed attitude toward illegitimacy, children born out of wedlock suffer measurable disadvantages in comparison with legitimate children, even when differences in social class are taken into account. They are more likely to die in infancy, and if they survive they are less likely to grow up in a stable two- parent family, even if their mothers subsequently marry; they are at least three times as likely to require public assistance. Illegitimacy thus constitutes a growing social and demographic problem.

The article presents abstracts of issue articles on topics including demographic findings of China's 2010 census, the relation between economic development and child malnutrition in sub-Saharan Africa, and the relation between educational attainment and cohabitation in Great Britain.

The article explores the cross-country differences in living arrangements and retirement choices of older adults, indicators of the interactions between states, markets, and families in providing economic security in old age. It mentions need and opportunities for pension coverage expansion in Latin America and documents existing programs that offer cash benefits to older adults not qualifying for contributory pension benefits. It also mentions context of economic growth and changing ideas.

The article discusses the study on the economic condition in China from 1991 to 2015. The study reportedly involved a decomposition analysis to analyze the impact of population, age structure shifts, labor force participation changes, and labor productivity on China's economy. The results revealed that the size of the population played a crucial role in China's economic growth in the 1990s, however it has declined starting in the late 2000s.

The article talks about the economic growth in China and the movement of migrant workers from rural to urban areas. It states that parents consider quality of education and public education policy requires all teachers to have minimum level of education and certification. It talks about urban public schools, where migrant children might feel out of place from one's home community.

The article discusses the effect of fertility decline on economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa. It states that decline in promotes changes in behavior that can lead to higher income and higher labor force participation rates for women. Topics include improved health outcomes for children, change in the population age structure, and increase in contraceptive use and expansion in family planning programs.

The article discusses the challenges posed by the demographic change in sub-Saharan Africa. It talks about the economic growth and the trending annual real gross domestic product (GDP). Topics include falling fertility, declining dependency ratios, and population pressure on human capital formation.

The impact of population structure on economic growth has been studied in recent decades using different methods to estimate the so-called demographic dividend. Besides, education has been pointed out as a key factor in economic growth. We propose a decomposition of the demographic dividend, into age and education effects. We illustrate the potentialities of the method, deriving an application to Mexico and Spain over the period 1970-2100. To that end, we estimate the National Transfer Accounts age profiles by schooling level and apply them to recently available population projections stratified by education level. Our results confirm the role of population age structure in the demographic dividend, but also reveal that education attainment can be even more crucial. Moreover, we find that how both age and education effects finally impact on economic growth depends to a great extent on the specific consumption and labor income age profiles in each country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dependency ratio and its components have had a long and productive life. Here we show that they are no longer the most accurate way of measuring important aspects of population aging. We present ratios related to employment, standardized workers and consumers, health care costs, pension costs, and who is old. These ratios are based either on new data or on new approaches to the study of population aging and are all available on the internet. We compare forecasts of those ratios with forecasts of the dependency ratio, both based on the same UN population data. In all cases, we find that the dependency ratio and the old-age dependency ratio are poor approximations to the more up-to-date ratios. There is little need to use the dependency ratio. More accurate measures are readily available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a reprint of the article “The IUSSP on a Data Revolution for Development" by the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP), which was published in November, 2014. Topics include addressing the glitches in data management, methods to improve the quality of data, and improvement in data utilization structure.

Despite recent improvements in economic performance, undernutrition rates in sub-Saharan Africa appear to have improved much less and rather inconsistently across the continent. We examine to what extent there is an empirical linkage between income growth and reductions of child undernutrition in Africa. We pool all DHS surveys for African countries, control for other correlates of undernutrition, and add country-level GDP per capita. We find that a 10 percent increase in GDP per capita is associated with 1.5 to 1.7 percent lower odds of being stunted, 2.8 to 3.0 percent lower odds of being underweight, and 3.5 to 4.0 percent lower odds of being wasted. Other drivers of undernutrition, including relative socioeconomic status and mother's education and her nutritional status, are quantitatively more important. This suggests that further increases in GDP will have only a modest impact on undernutrition and broader interventions are required to accelerate progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We assess quantitatively the effect of exogenous reductions in fertility on output per capita. Our simulation model allows for effects that run through schooling, the size and age structure of the population, capital accumulation, parental time input into childrearing, and crowding of fixed natural resources. The model is parameterized using a combination of microeconomic estimates and standard components of quantitative macroeconomic theory. We apply the model to examine the effect of a change in fertility from the UN medium-variant to the UN low-variant projection in Nigeria. For a base case set of parameters, we find that such a change would raise output per capita by 5.6 percent at a horizon of 20 years and by 11.9 percent at a horizon of 50 years. We conclude with a discussion of the quantitative significance of these results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the second half of the twentieth century rapid population growth in the less developed countries has redrawn the global demographic map. Many once-poor countries have also experienced strong economic growth, which in combination with the demographic change has yielded marked shifts in the world's economic balance, with far-reaching geopolitical implications. At the same time, low fertility in much of the developed world presages a future of population shrinkage, accompanied by pronounced population aging. In per capita terms, the economic advantages of the developed countries will likely persist for many years, but their actual and potential falls in population may accentuate their loss of relative economic power and eventually lead to marginalization of their international standing and influence. Preventing population shrinkage will be an urgent task for them, requiring either large-scale immigration (likely to be ruled out) or raising the birth rate. Existing pro-family policies have had at best modest effects on fertility levels. Two novel approaches are described that would plausibly have greater impact. One would counteract the disproportionate influence of older voters in the electorate by granting voting rights to all citizens, allowing custodial parents to vote on behalf of their children. The second would reform the public pension system to reestablish the link between the financial security of retired persons and the number of children they have raised to productive adulthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urbanization has traditionally been understood as a byproduct of economic development, but this explanatory framework fails to account for the phenomenon of 'urbanization without growth' observed in sub-Saharan Africa throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In light of this apparent anomaly, I argue that urbanization is better understood as a global historical process driven by population dynamics associated with technological and institutional innovations that have substantially improved disease control and food security in urban settlements across the globe. These innovations first emerged in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and were subsequently diffused through colonialism, trade, and international development assistance. A range of qualitative and quantitative evidence is presented to demonstrate that this historically grounded theory of urbanization offers a more convincing explanation for the stylized facts of Africa's urban transition-and hence the process of world urbanization more broadly-than the traditional economic account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an analysis of the importance of family in the context of household economics and demographic transitions worldwide. It is noted that in less developed economies, children contribute significant quantities of labor to the household, whereas in more developed countries they do not. The effects of kinship networks on the well-being of children are analyzed in terms of societies at various stages of demographic transition. Data from various studies is presented on the relationship between fertility rates and child-care arrangements.

The article presents a discussion of intergenerational economic conflicts associated with demographic transitions, emphasizing the larger context of human cultural evolution. An overview of the history of economic development and intergenerational transfer payments is presented, beginning with the traditional arrangements of hunter-gatherer societies. Data from the National Transfer Accounts project is cited to illustrate various stages of socioeconomic complexity, and an outline of theoretical work on such issues is presented.

The article challenges the notion that below-replacement fertility and its local variation in China are primarily attributable to the government's birth planning policy. Data from the 2000 census and provincial statistical yearbooks are used to compare fertility in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, two of the most developed provinces in China, to examine the relationship between socioeconomic development and low fertility. The article demonstrates that although low fertility in China was achieved under the government's restrictive one-child policy, structural changes brought about by socioeconomic development and ideational shifts accompanying the new wave of globalization played a key role in China's fertility reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reconstructions and projections of populations by age, sex, and educational attainment for 120 countries since 1970 are used to assess the global relationship between improvements in human capital and democracy. Democracy is measured by the Freedom House indicator of political rights. Similar to an earlier study on the effects of improving educational attainment on economic growth, the greater age detail of this new dataset resolves earlier ambiguities about the effect of improving education as assessed using a global set of national time series. The results show consistently strong effects of improving overall levels of educational attainment, of a narrowing gender gap in education, and of fertility declines and the subsequent changes in age structure on improvements in the democracy indicator. This global relationship is then applied to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Over the past two decades Iran has experienced the world's most rapid fertility decline associated with massive increases in female education. The results show that based on the experience of 120 countries since 1970, Iran has a high chance of significant movement toward more democracy over the following two decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sarkozy Report is a study commissioned by the French President on better ways to measure the level and progress of societal well-being than conventional economic indicators such as GDP. Despite being prepared by prominent economists—the commission was led by Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi—the Report rejects reliance on “production-oriented” measures of progress in favor of a broader array of quality-of-life indicators, some of them subjective, and measures of the sustainability of well-being into the future. These multiple dimensions of well-being, it argues, should be used in policy decisions and welfare evaluations. The views expressed in the Report may portend a sea-change in the way economists think about the benefits of economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines China's socioeconomic transformation towards health and mortality that began during the late 1970s. These socioeconomic transformations have led to great economic growth, and living standards even in the poorest parts of China have improved over a twenty-five year time span. A survey was conducted by the author to gauge the scope and breadth of those economic reforms, and the study found that while living standards have improved greatly in China, an inequality of income distribution has emerged as well.

The usual lessons drawn from East Asia's striking experience of health and fertility transition concern the efficacy of well-designed government programs catering to an existing or ideationally stimulated demand. An alternative interpretation sees the demographic change—and the uptake of services—as a byproduct of social and economic development together with, in some cases, strong government pressures. This article probes more deeply into this experience, seeking to identify common features of development design and administration that underlay it. The broad sequence entailed, initially, establishment of an effective, typically authoritarian, system of local administration, providing (sometimes incidentally) a framework for promotion and service delivery in health, education, and family planning. Subsequent economic liberalization offered new opportunities for upward mobility—and greater risks of backsliding—but along with erosion of social capital and the breakdown or privatization of service programs. The study is mainly focused on seven countries: Taiwan and South Korea (“tiger” economies), Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia (“second wave” countries), and China and Vietnam (“market-Leninist” economies). The period is roughly from the 1960s to the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schooled in the traditions of the Malthusian theory, economists, thinking in terms of static economics, have typically placed an optimistic interpretation upon the cessation of population growth. This indeed is also the interpretation suggested by the National Resources Committee which recently has issued an exhaustive statistical inquiry into current and prospective changes in population growth. In a fundamental sense this conclusion is thoroughly sound, for it can scarcely be questioned that a continued growth of population at the rate experienced in the nineteenth century would rapidly present insoluble problems. Economic analysis from the earliest development of science has been concerned with the role played by economic progress. Various writers have included under this caption different things, but here one may say that the constituent elements of economic progress are inventions, the discovery and development of new territory and new resources, and the growth of population. Each of these in turn, severally and in combination, has opened investment outlets and caused a rapid growth of capital formation.

Copyright of Population & Development Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article presents the author's response to a comment about his article on population and resources. I have admired Professor Gale Johnson for so many years that, for me, it is an honor even to be chastised by him for what he sees as the errors of my ways. On studying his comment, however, I can only think that while Johnson is an outstanding economics writer, he is less than an outstanding reader. Consider first the admonishment with which he opens his comment, that I cannot have read widely on statistical estimates of the relationships between population and economic growth, because the regression analyses have not produced the uniform result that he says I took the literature to imply. In point of fact, I drew the very conclusion he says he himself drawn from that literature, namely cross-country regressions in which population is a determining factor of economic growth have given us mixed messages. It is in part because the estimates in question have given us mixed messages that I explored the links between population, poverty, and the natural-resource base by pursuing a very different route from the one offered by cross-country regression analysis. Moreover, it should be more than a mere puzzle to readers of my article that Johnson thinks I need to be reminded of the relevance of the recent history for understanding the links that I explored.

This article presents the author's comments on Partha Dasgupta's article on population and resources in a 2004 issue. In a recent article in this journal, Dasgupta concludes: judging by level of analysis, most of those who have been investigating economic growth, poverty, environmental stress, and fertility behavior have not read wide beyond their particular fields of interest. Unfortunately Dasgupta has not referenced widely even in areas that one might assume were his fields of interest. Let me note one example. Dasgupta mentions only two of the many statistical estimates of the relationships between population and economic growth that were made following the 1986 report of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences on population and economic growth. While these two studies have shown negative relationships, other studies have found a variety of outcomes: no statistically significant effect of population growth on economic growth, occasionally a positive effect,a nd also occasionally a negative effect. The regression analyses have not produced the unfirom result that Dasgupta implies. I am among those whose analyses of the interrelationships between population and resources Dasgupta criticizes for being overly optimistic.

Copyright of Population & Development Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Population & Development Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Population & Development Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Population & Development Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Population & Development Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Population & Development Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article informs that the problems of development in the Third World were the subject of the Eighteenth Special Session of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, held in New York City in April 1990. Although the problems addressed at the session have been of continuing concern for the UN and its specialized agencies, a round of discussions of comparable level and scope devoted to Third World development issues has not taken place since the Seventh Special Session of the General Assembly, held in 1975. The debates at the Eighteenth Special Session showed a marked shift in thinking about development and in the approaches recommended for overcoming economic problems of the Third World. The overall tone of the discussions appears to have been particularly influenced by two developments that came to a head in the late 1980s. The Eighteenth Special Session ended on May 1, 1990, with the unanimous adoption of a document entitled "Declaration on International Economic Co-Operation, in Particular the Revitalization of Economic Growth and Development of the Developing Countries." The declaration is a remarkable document both in its retrospective assessment of development trends and in setting out objectives for the 1990s and describing means for their attainment.

Copyright of Population & Development Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Population & Development Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)