Population and Poverty: A Review and Restatement

Worldwide in the 1990s over one billion persons are estimated to have a purchasing power of below a dollar per day, the conventional demarcation of “absolute poverty.” Other dimensions of poverty, extending beyond income measures to encompass a person’s broader capabilities and social functioning, are less empirically accessible. Poverty is commonly thought to be associated with high fertility and rapid population growth (regionally, South Asia and Africa have the highest poverty rates), but that view finds little support in the extensive statistical research literature on population and poverty. However, a clear-cut depiction of such an institutionally contingent relationship is not to be expected. Economy-wide effects of population change on poverty can be traced through direct changes in distributional outcomes and through effects resulting from changes in rural and urban environments and social organization. The indirect links are complicated by problems of characterizing the urban informal sector and by the relocation of poverty through migration (and its recomposition through economic mobility). Analytical difficulties arise in stipulating ceteris paribus conditions against which to assess demographic influences. Stylized models can show how certain patterns of social structure and economic transfers in a society sustain resilient “equilibrium trap” situations that generate adverse demographic and poverty outcomes. Although neither fertility nor poverty is usefully regarded as a policy instrument, there are policy measures that impinge on both. The familiar examples of these are programs in education, health, and family planning. Policies in the economic and political domain may be equally or more important. The developmentalist strategies behind many of the strongest economic growth performances of recent decades, albeit contentious on some other grounds, have been associated with poverty alleviation and fertility decline. This material may not be reproduced without written permission from the author. In the mid-1990s the population growth rate of the world's less developed regions (in the UN's designation, comprising some four-fifths of the total world population) is about 1.7 percent per year, well below its 1960s peak of 2.5 percent. Average fertility, which was around 6 children per woman in the 1960s, has fallen to near 3, its lowest level ever, and continues to decline. For many countries that have experienced these demographic trends, questions about the consequences of rapid population growth for society and the economy might appear to be no longer matters for urgent investigation. They could be left to more leisurely deliberation by social and economic historians: still able to arouse heated debate but with answers that are of diminished import for public policy and human welfare. Several factors should give pause to any such relegation. First, the demographic expansion implied by the projected future growth rate trend in the less developed regions is roughly another doubling of population, an additional 4 billion or so people to be accommodated, most of them coming in the next three decades. Second, modest region-wide or country-wide average population growth rates often obscure much faster changes in the sizes of particular population categories, with effects that may be very substantial. Notable among such categories would be the older age groups and the populations of cities. Third, there is a section of the less developed regions, namely the UN's category of “least developed,” where demographic conditions of the 1960s or even earlier still prevail. The 10 percent of the world's population contained in the least developed countries amounts to 600 million people. These countries combine rapid population growth (2.6 percent per year) and rates of economic growth that for several decades have left per capita incomes virtually unchanged (averaging about $1000 per year in purchasing power terms in the mid-1990s). For them, population issues retain all their