economic homework 3
Unit 4 - Population Growth, Urbanization and Internal Migration
Population growth worries most of us. We understand that the world’s raw materials, land and water are, at least in some ultimate sense, fixed and cannot be increased. How can this limited supply of resources support a population that appears to be growing by leaps and bounds?
The basic facts suggest that there are some grounds for worry. In the year 1 AD the world’s population was about 250 million. It took about 1,850 years for the population to grow by 1 billion. But between 1900 and 1950 another 1 billion was added – in only 50 years! And this was only the start. The next billion was added 20 years later, the billion after that in only 13 years. The world’s population was just over 6 billion in 2000 and is expected to reach over 9 billion by 2050.
Almost all of the projected population increase over the next 50 years will take place in the developing countries.
Are we doomed to disaster? Some people argue that the environment and our food supplies cannot sustain such increases and that we are heading for the edge of a cliff.
This may not be the case. Two key arguments point the way to avoiding such a catastrophe.
First, as incomes rise, we know that birth rates tend to fall dramatically. In the developed world for example, many nations are not even reproducing their populations. As development spreads, the argument goes, falling birth rates will take care of the problem. As well, effective population control policies will lead households to choose to have fewer children. If these events occur, will they happen fast enough?
Most economists would recognize a fallacy in the initial argument that I’ve stated at the beginning of this talk. Resources may be fixed in some ultimate sense, but the efficiency with which we employ them is not. Technological improvements have always allowed us to produce more per unit of resource consumed. Without the Green Revolution in agriculture for example, the world could not possibly feed everyone alive today. Food production per capita is much higher today than it was 50 or 100 years ago, despite a dramatic increase in population.
In this unit we examine the complex relationship between population growth and development. We reach one very important conclusion, that fertility rates are unlikely to come down substantially unless women have good access to education and labour market opportunities and unless we pay specific attention to the status of women in society.
We investigate two interesting case studies, one in India and the other in China, that illustrate different policy approaches to population control.
We will also consider the important issue of internal migration, as individuals and families in rural areas leave for the bright lights of the city searching for greater economic opportunity. Are current patterns of migration efficient, or have government’s pro-urban strategies produced too much migration, leading only to sprawling, violent urban slums and disappointed migrants?
As ever, we find that policies intended to produce one result in one market often produce unintended consequences in other markets.
