What was the result of rapid population growth in colonial America during the 18th century?

2.3.1.5.3 Age Trends

Rapid population growth leads to a country with a young average age. Young populations require creation of new infrastructure including shelter, health care, and schools. If the country has the resources to employ their new labor, the population increase can lead to rapid economic growth. If, on the other hand, the country cannot utilize its workforce productively, then unemployment rises, often leading to civil strife and emigration.

Many industrial economies have birth rates below the level required to replace their existing populations. Low birth rates can lead to a population with a relatively high average age. As populations age, internal consumption declines and any economic growth comes from exporting goods and services. Many industrial countries with slow population growth are also concerned about the burden placed on young workers by the need to care for an aging population. These countries may need to import labor, and the new workers can benefit from utilizing the existing infrastructure and perhaps rekindle growth, which ultimately benefits the country.

27.5.1 To avoid traffic congestion

The rapid population growth can cause the breakdown of the existing transport facility of the town unless certain proactive anticipatory measures have been taken on a priority basis. For that reason, the plan of shifting the bus terminal from Tinkonia (old bus terminal) to Nawabhat and Alisha (new bus terminals) has been taken in 2012 to avoid traffic congestion within the Burdwan town by the envisagement of the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in the City Development Plan with respect to the development potential of the town. This long-term perspective plan was also taken for decentralization of Burdwan town because the old bus terminal, Tinkonia, was located only 0.71 km away from the Central Business District. At present, the new bus terminal at Alisha is used by all buses of the Southern Damodar section (Arambagh, Raina, and Khandaghosh) and Eastern G.T. Road section (Memari, Barshul, Shaktigarh, and Kolkata) as per the proposal. On the other hand, the other new bus terminal at Nawabhat is being used by the buses from the Durgapur–Asansol section, Kalna, Nabadweep section, Katwa section, and Gushkara section (Office of the District Magistrate, Government of West Bengal, 2012). The most interesting thing is that both the new bus terminals are located in the peripheral region so that the town can grow along the periphery region of Burdwan town due to the development of the transport network.

For providing a better passenger facility, the construction of India's second largest four-lane cable-stayed 188.431 Meter long Railway Overbridge (Prasad, 2016) over Bardhaman station has also been completed in the joint venture of Indian Railways and West Bengal Government, instead of old and narrow existing Railway Overbridge connecting the Katwa and Kalna road with G. T. Road. It also helps to avoid traffic jam near the Burdwan railway station. These two schemes were adopted to get off from the transport-related problems like traffic congestion and pollution for providing better civic amenities.

7 Macroeconomics of Fertility and Development: Diminishing Returns to Labor, Human Capital and Savings, and Changing Age Composition

Several lines of macroeconomic reasoning are used to infer how declines in fertility during the demographic transition could affect economic growth and development. First, there was Malthus (1789), who relied on the classical economic idea of diminishing returns to labor when workers are employed with a fixed supply of complementary resources, such as agricultural land. The high fertility in low-income countries in the first two decades following the Second World War was viewed in a Malthusian framework as an impediment to economic development. Population growth increased in these poor countries from 0.5% per year in 1900, to 1.2% by 1940, and doubled again to 2.5% by 1960 (Kuznets, 1966; United Nations, 2003). Although due to reduced mortality rather than increased fertility, this “population explosion” appeared to overwhelm the capacity to accumulate capital and employ productively such rapidly growing populations. A demographic poverty trap could arise as Malthus had hypothesized, and slow economic development in these poor countries unless fertility declined quickly (Coale & Hoover, 1958).

However, the Malthusian link between rapid population growth and slower economic development was not evident to Kuznets (1967) from his analysis of historical data, nor did Malthus' forecasts materialize in subsequent decades, as savings rates increased in many parts of the developing world, and human capital formation and technical change increased total factor productivity and achieved unprecedented growth in output per worker (Johnson, 1999; National Research Council, 1986). Technical change and possibly behavioral responses to the decline in mortality may have outweighed the diminishing returns to labor foreseen by Malthus, allowing growth in per capita income in Latin America and Asia. Even the crude associations across countries between population growth rates and growth rates in availability of calories per capita are insignificant until 1985, and only thereafter from 1985 to 1995 is the overall association negative. The growing scarcity of food supplies recently in countries with rapid population growth appears to be explained by declining net imports of food, whereas domestic crop production has continued to outpace population growth (Kravdal, 2001).35

The second macroeconomic framework used by economists to assess the implications of the fertility decline focused on a life-cycle pattern of consumption and savings. It was expected that high fertility would depress aggregate rates of savings and thereby discourage economic growth, because the proportion of the population in their most productive ages would not increase until fertility began to fall secularly. In a classic formulation of the issue by Modigliani and Brumburg (1954), they assumed that the marginal utility from consumption diminishes as the level of consumption increases, lifetime utility is time separable, and the age profile of adult productivity rises and falls over the life cycle. Adults in this setting would be motivated to accumulate savings in their most productive periods to sustain their consumption in old age when their productivity declines. These widely accepted assumptions led to the hypothesis that savings rates would rise and fall for a cohort over its life cycle. Holding factor productivity constant, the decline in fertility would contribute over time to an increase in the proportion of the population between the ages of 35 and 55, and thus to an increase in the average national savings rates, all else equal. Some studies have reported within East Asian countries a relationship over time between age composition changes and savings rates changes that could have contributed to the Asian miracle. But this relationship is fragile and evaporates when lagged savings is not included as an exogenous regressor or it is treated as endogenous, or country-specific time trends in savings rates are included in the estimated model (Higgins & Williamson, 1997; Schultz, 2004a). Counterexamples are also notable. Savings rates have stagnated in other regions, such as Latin America, even though the region experienced a relatively early demographic transition which generated the changes in age compositions as observed in East Asia. In a country such as India, in which the demographic transition has been more gradual and the changes in age composition more modest, savings rates have nonetheless increased (Schultz, 2004a). There are also inconsistencies between micro- and macroevidence. Microeconomic studies of household surveys do not find the pronounced life-cycle variation in savings rates in either high- or low-income countries as postulated by Modigliani (Deaton & Paxson, 1997). Although the life-cycle model of consumption and savings behavior remains a plausible conceptual framework for studying many macroeconomic issues, it does not provide a satisfactory explanation for savings and growth in terms of changes in the age composition of low-income countries.

Labor force participation rates for males also rise and fall with an individual's age in many populations, leading to the expectation that labor supply per capita would tend to rise as fertility falls, for at least three decades into the demographic transition. In the longer run, 40 or 50 years after fertility begins to decline, the share of the male population in the labor force is expected to decline, as the fraction of the population over age 50 increases more than the fraction of children falls, as illustrated in the rapid aging of contemporary Japan. This expectation is reinforced as the age-specific death rates among the elderly continue to decline.

However, most of the increase in labor supply per adult following the demographic transition in East Asia and Latin America is due to the increased market labor force participation of women, whose participation profiles by age differ across countries and changes over time. The female participation rates outside of the family in the wage labor force shows a general tendency to increase with women's education and the level of development in a country (Durand, 1975; Schultz, 1990). It is also likely that the women who enter the market labor force are also those who are bear fewer children, and who are thus able to engage more readily in economic activities outside of their household. The underlying factors changing fertility may thus be responsible for changing a variety of other family coordinated productive behaviors, including most centrally women's market labor supply. Therefore, changes in fertility and age composition cannot be treated as exogenous causes for change in labor inputs to the market. Both fertility and female labor supply are jointly determined in response to male and female market wage opportunities and nonearned income, among other factors (Mincer, 1963).

Schooling and vocational training are concentrated among youth, and thus if enrollment rates are held constant, these private and social investments in the human capital of youth will increase on a per capita basis for a decade or two after fertility starts to decline. Moreover, if the decline in family size encourages parents to invest in more years of schooling on average for their children or in higher quality education, this increase in child “quality” may be an indirect consequence of fertility decline that could favor long-run economic growth. In other words, if parents behave as if the schooling of their children is a substitute for the number of children they have, population policies which facilitate the decline in fertility by reducing the cost of birth control can contribute to the formation of more human capital as explored in more detail at the microlevel in the next section. A model is required to extrapolate from population policies that reduce fertility to assess how they modify other lifetime family resource allocations, notably the reallocation of the time of family members, and the investment in human capital and various forms of physical capital. The country-level correlations between age composition and economic growth do not clarify the causal pathways from the resources and opportunities of families, to their health outcomes and fertility, which drive changes in the age composition of the population. There is no reason to assume that age profiles of endogenous household behavior, such as savings or female market labor force participation, will remain unchanged when fertility declines during the demographic transition. Depending on whether the behavior complements or substitutes for fertility, the behavior may decreases or increase, respectively, and these evolving forms of life-cycle behavior may contribute to economic development or stagnation. The decline in fertility is also generally associated with increased schooling and in particular women's postschooling investment in career skills that will modify systematically the age profile of market earnings for women and men, and potentially spill over to affect savings and consumption behavior of their families.

An alternative research agenda to the study of patterns across and within countries seeks to understand how individual household behavior responds to arguably exogenous changes in the individual and family environment, such as changes in relative prices, wages of women, men, and children, returns to schooling and other human capital and other asset, and technical change, which may be biased toward better educated labor (Mincer, 1963; Schultz, 1981). For example, it might be hypothesized that the decline in fertility is caused by technical change, which raises the returns on human capital, and thereby encourages parents to invest more in their children's human capital. Parents consequently have fewer children, and women increase the share of their adult lives working in activities other than child care (Foster & Rosenzweig, 2007; Galor & Weil, 1999, 2000; Rosenzweig, 1990). The intercorrelations between fertility and these family lifetime time allocations, investments, and outcomes do not describe the causal impact of fertility nor can these intercorrelations be treated as consequences of fertility and used as a reason to promote fertility reducing population policies (Behrman, 2001; Birdsall, Kelley, & Sinding, 2001; Bloom, Canning, & Sevilla, 2002). Much empirical evidence substantiates the view that fertility is subject to choice in many settings and is determined simultaneously with these other family behaviors (Rosenzweig & Wolpin, 1980a,b; Schultz, 1981, 1997). Cross-country regressions are notoriously difficult to interpret as representing causal relationships, because in the case of mortality and fertility they tend to be dominated empirically by poorly understood secular trends, and because mortality and fertility are jointly determined by unobservables at the family level. This suggests that empirical evidence be analyzed at the household level and organized to identify plausible structure in models by exploiting variation over time as well as across individuals (Moffitt, 2005; Schultz, 2004b).

4 Specific Insights on Demographic Phenomena

Population growth and urbanization and their impacts on traffic-related air pollution and human exposures

The importance and relevance of TRAP continues to increase with the continuing rapid population growth and increasing urbanization. The global population has risen substantially over the past century and is estimated to reach 9.8 billion in 2050, and 11.2 billion in 2100, from just 7.6 billion in 2017 (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2017). With population growth and economic growth comes an increase in the number of vehicles being manufactured, purchased, driven, and emitting more air pollutants. In developed countries, there is already a cultural and economic dependence on motor vehicles as the primary mode of transport which dominates urban transport design and planning. Although mass motorization started much later in developing countries, it is growing rapidly, causing similar problems in many developing cities (Khreis et al., 2016). The increased demand for travel and transport activity continues to overpower emission regulations and advancements in vehicle and fuel technology (Metz et al., 2007), and, therefore, TRAP is expected to rise in some regions. Another worrying trend in this context is the rapid and unprecedented urbanization that the world is currently witnessing. Urban populations are swelling with over 50% of the world’s population now living in cities, and this percentage is projected to increase to 68% by the year 2050 (United Nations, 2018). While cities are the world’s engines of economic growth, innovation and social change with annual economic activity of about 85% of global gross domestic product (Gouldson et al., 2015), they are also hot spots for human exposure to air pollution, mainly originating from road traffic. In cities, traffic activity is not only (generally) higher but also acts in close proximity to people making their potential for harmful exposures, and associated adverse health effects, higher as well. In 2016 The World Health Organization (WHO) reported that 92% of the world’s population lives in cities where air pollution levels exceeds the WHO air-quality guidelines (World Health Organization, 2016), guidelines which are still too high to fully protect public health.

1 Early History

The period immediately following World War II in South Asia was characterized by rapid population growth, food shortages, and poverty. A great variety of wheat and rice varieties were in use, each adapted to their local micro-environment; little chemical fertilizer was used and no pesticides, and yields were low. In 1966 a semi-dwarf variety of rice known as IR8, bred at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, was distributed amongst farmers in parts of India, whilst a semi-dwarf wheat originally bred in Mexico was also introduced. Where these High Yielding Varieties (HYVs) were adopted, yields and output increased dramatically. This led W S Gaud to state in a lecture in the USA in 1968: ‘this and other developments in the field of agriculture contain the makings of a new revolution. It is not a violent Red Revolution like that of the Soviets … I call it the Green Revolution’(quoted in Dalrymple 1979). The importance of the Ford and Rockefeller foundations and of the US government in sponsoring the breeding programs in Mexico and the Philippines meant that much of the criticism of the new technology and its alleged consequences was ideological. The term ‘revolution’ was perhaps unfortunate. The breeding of higher-yielding or disease-resistant varieties had been going on in Europe, North America, and parts of Asia since the rediscovery of Mendel's work at the beginning of the twentieth century, whilst the use of chemical fertilizers and applications of pesticides had been practiced since the 1920s in Western Europe, although adopted at far greater rate after 1945. More relevant were the developments in Japan.

Much Japanese rice had long been irrigated, but the area irrigated was increased in the 1890s when the most successful existing rice varieties were selected and their seed distributed to farmers. Chemical fertilizers were also applied. By the 1930s, rice yields in Japan and its colonies Korea and Formosa were substantially above those elsewhere in Asia. Even in South Asia there had been advances in technology before 1966. Indian grain output increased by 62 percent before 1950 and 1964, and in Pakistan by 59 percent (Farmer 1981). Although rice yields in China in the 1950s were low compared with the rest of East Asia, semi-dwarf rices were bred there independently of the research in the Philippines and distributed to Chinese farmers before IR8 was released.

Abstract

Since the 1960s, governments and private organizations implemented family planning programs, largely driven by fears of rapid population growth. By the 1990s, the rationale for these programs shifted to the human right to autonomy in sexuality and reproduction. With the 20th anniversary of the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development Programme of Action approaching, this article examines the feminist critique of population programs that led to this historic shift. It examines gaps that remain in the implementation of the Programme of Action, and emerging issues – including youth sexual rights – that feminists are prioritizing as key areas for population and development policies and programs.

3.3 National Academy of Sciences (1971)

The most pessimistic assessment of population consequences since Malthus appeared in a study organized by the National Academy of Sciences. The findings, Rapid Population Growth: Consequences and Policy Implications, appeared in two parts: Volume I, a short Executive Summary, and Volume II, a large set of papers compiled by a panel of distinguished scholars. The study's findings, as summarized by the Executive Summary, are baffling and difficult to interpret. They must be handled with care.

On the one hand, the Executive Summary conveyed a highly negative, indeed an outright alarmist, assessment of the impact of rapid population growth. Twenty-five separate adverse impacts were listed and assessed; no notable positive effects of demographic change were identified. Moreover, there was a substantial disconnection between the Executive Summary and the findings of the key scholars participating in the study, as documented by the papers found in Volume II. The Executive Summary, whose pessimistic conclusions obtained wide publicity in the 1970s, was demonstrably unfaithful to the scholarly studies in Volume II. The Summary was not vetted with the scholars who participated in the study, and indeed its authorship is unknown to this day, in spite of extensive attempts to clarify the historical record (an exhaustive historical assessment of this episode is provided in Kelley 2001). Clearly the assessment of the Executive Summary must be strongly discounted. In spite of this, however, a careful reading of the papers and supporting components of the Report do reveal an important insight that assists in illuminating the ebb and flow of population assessments over time.

Specifically, the Executive Summary was by admission based mainly on ‘direct,’ shorter-run impacts of demographic change. (‘We have limited ourselves to relative short-term…issues,’ p. vi). In contrast, the major research papers supporting that study in Volume II, which were much less pessimistic, were based on a longer-run focus. More than any other factor, the outcomes of the population debates from the 1970s to the present day would turn on this difference in time perspective. Direct, shorter-run impacts of demographic change are almost always attenuated (and sometimes even offset) by feedbacks that occur only over longer periods of time.

Water Resources

The present and future availability of adequate supplies of freshwater for human and agricultural needs is already critical in many regions, such as the Middle East. Rapid population growth and increased total water consumption are rapidly depleting the availability of water. Between 1950 and 1995, the per capita availability of freshwater worldwide declined by approximately 70%.

All vegetation requires and transpires massive amounts of water during the growing season. Agriculture commands more water than any other activity on Earth. Currently, 70% of the water removed from all sources worldwide is used solely for irrigation. Of this amount, approximately two-thirds is consumed by plant life (nonrecoverable). For example, a corn crop that produces approximately 9000 kg ha−1 of grain uses approximately 7 million l ha−1 of water during the growing season. To supply this much water to the crop, approximately 1000 mm of rainfall per hectare – or 10 million l of water – is required during the growing season.

The greatest threat to maintaining freshwater supplies is depletion of the surface and groundwater resources essential for supplying the needs of a rapidly growing human population. Surface water is not always managed effectively, resulting in water shortages and pollution that threaten human health and the aquatic biota. The Colorado River, for example, is used so heavily by Colorado, California, Arizona, and other states that by the time the river reaches Mexico, no more than a trickle runs into the Gulf of California.

Another major threat to maintaining ample freshwater resources is pollution. Considerable water pollution has been documented in the United States, but this problem is of greatest concern in countries in which water regulations are less rigorously enforced or do not exist. Developing countries discharge approximately 90–95% of their untreated urban sewage directly into surface waters. Of India’s 3119 towns and cities, only 269 have partial sewage treatment facilities, and a mere 8 have full wastewater treatment facilities. A total of 114 cities dump untreated sewage and partially cremated bodies directly into the sacred Ganges River. Downstream, the polluted water is used for drinking, bathing, cooking, and washing. This situation is typical of many rivers and lakes in developing countries.

2 The Content of Population Policy: Sensitive, Fragmented, Confrontational

There has never been policy consensus on the nature, importance, or remedies in this field. The first stage of policy making revolved around the question of whether rapid population growth and high levels of fertility were in fact a threat, and what to do about them if they were. Many continued to insist that high levels of population growth were a transitory factor that would decrease with development and progress. The answer was seen to be investment in accelerated general development, not specifically targeted programs, i.e., ‘development is the best contraceptive.’

Those on the other side of the issue used phrases such as ‘population bomb’ to describe what Malthus in the late eighteenth century foresaw as predictable crisis deriving from the geometric nature of human growth expansion, not sustainable by the foreseen linear growth of agricultural production. Concerns about the real and also postulated but never provable impacts of population growth expanded beyond food production.

Early advocates for international fertility reduction efforts voiced fears that such growth would lead to mass starvation, perpetual economic underdevelopment, internal conflict, and external wars to expand boundaries. In late 1960s there were confident assertions from certain US thinkers that the battle to feed humanity was over and that widespread famine would shortly begin. In later years, the list of concerns expanded to include the impact on the environment, climate change, and the battle to preserve biodiversity.

On the other side of the ledger, concern for the human rights implications of family planning programs and the emergence of feminist concerns in their turn significantly reshaped the content of international debate and many population programs. Family planning and contraception services began in the industrialized world with Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes in the USA and UK, respectively. These programs were delivered through the medical model of a doctor–patient relationship. What developed in the 1960s and 1970s was the novel idea that the state, or a public health service provider, should provide these services on a mass basis in order to bring down the number of births. Thus was born the idea of officially endorsed (or at least tolerated) family planning programs. Begun in Southeast Asia in the 1960s, family planning programs spread throughout the developing world in the subsequent 20–30 years. Internationalization occurred as foreign states and international actors intervened in such domestic programs, sometimes providing the impetus for their creation. The full impact on policy of the multilateralization efforts came somewhat later, with the creation of an international network, influenced by and influencing the existing programs.

The tools of the family planning part of population policy were largely unavailable until the 1960s. Such contraceptives as existed in the first half of the twentieth century were unwieldy, unmentionable, and often illegal. The advent of the contraceptive pill in 1960 provoked a revolution in behavior in the industrialized world. With it grew the conviction that new contraceptives, especially those which could be injected, implanted, inserted, or swallowed as opposed to being applied at the time of sexual relations, had the potential to stop or slow the rising levels of population in the developing world.

Yet another part of debate centered on the degree of importance that should be accorded to these tools and to the provision of contraception services vis-à-vis other fertility-influencing interventions such as girls education. This issue was characterized as the ‘beyond family planning’ debate. Later, with feminism came a strong concern that women's health issues must override concern for demographic increase in the population agenda. Included were preoccupations related to both the mechanism of program delivery, particularly targets, and several of the recently developed contraceptives. This discernibly altered and shaped population policy programs from the 1990s onward. The emergence of AIDS similarly pulled new elements related to the reproductive health of individuals into the population policy ambit.

These debates and uncertainties and the transitory coalitions that have endorsed particular actions at specific times have given changing goals and forms to international population policy.

While demographic trends can be discussed in statistical and abstract terms, and contraceptive techniques discussed in terms of their mechanisms of action, the reality of population change is grounded in the most personal human relationships, in human sexuality, and in highly sensitive social issues. These include the nature and power relationships that establish marriage, the role and status of women, the behavior of adolescents, definitions of morality and immorality, the ethical judgments related to sexual activity, and to the very value attached to life at various stages.

For this reason, the myriad of social institutions that define different societies, including organized religions and political forces, have strong interests in most population issues. The major religious have been supportive with the notable exclusion of official Roman Catholic policy and the orthodox elements of many established churches. The moral and ethical issues are complex and the introduction of state activity in these areas therefore often highly contentious. That foreign states might have an interest in the decision of a man and woman in another country to have or not have more children could not but raise very complicated issues indeed.