UN Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs,
with support from the UN Population Fund (UNFPA)
|
| UN Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, with support from the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) |
|
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For further information please contact the United Nations Population Fund
at 220 East 42nd Street, New York, NY 10017 USA or via email:
vlassoff@unfpa.org
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FROM: Population Growth and Economic Development: Report on the
Consultative Meeting of Economists Convened by the United Nations
Population Fund, 28-29 September 1992, New York. New York:UNFPA, 1993
A DISSENTING STATEMENT
By George J. Stolnitz
Professor Emeritus of Economics
Indiana University
The Statement, even as it stands, could serve usefully towards
making a needed "counter-revisionist" statement. However, the
Statement's value and persuasiveness could be enhanced by
incorporating many or all of the themes below. Obviously, the themes
as presented here are not adapted to being incorporated into a
recommendations document. However, some of the substance and a good
deal of tone could be adapted to the eventual document's purposes and
message. Below I give my dissenting statement:
Adverse population pressures clearly associated with rapid
growth (over 2 to 2 1/4 per cent) are both numerous and of prime
significance from both individual welfare and societal development
points of view. Among such pressures, the following stand out:
* Heavy costs of educating the young in the NDCs (for
"newly developing countries") is an obvious and major case in
point. Pronounced inadequacies with respect to both elemental
qualitative criteria (teachers' training, physical facilities,
instructional aids) and quantitative standards (rising numbers
of school-age children not in school, despite impressively large
increases in published primary and secondary enrolment rates,
as well as large enrolment-attendance discrepancies) continue
to persist in nearly all of the Third World.
* Below-standard housing in nearly all NDC urban areas and
even lower quality of accommodations in their rural areas are
at levels which cannot be overcome in any foreseeable planning
period, even with present populations, much less with rapidly
increasing numbers.
* Elemental food intake standards are infrequently met in
most of the Third World, or are met in unstable, highly
vulnerable ways. This is true even with respect to the minimum
criterion of adequate caloric intake, especially among the
economically disadvantaged majorities of NDC populations.
Frequent declines and downtrends of domestic
production/consumption and food import ratios are tell-tale
indicators of insufficient intake/domestic production and
resulting balance-of-trade effects in large parts of the
developing world. Such tendencies have been further aggravated
by seemingly entrenched adverse trends in NDC terms-of-trade
patterns; such trends have beset Third World developmental
prospects during much of the post-World War II era.
* Sustained and major degrees of labour force under-
utilization encountered practically everywhere in the NDCs,
whether in the forms of open urban unemployment, submarginal
urban informal sectors, rural disguised unemployment,
proliferating landlessness, or excessive agrarian population
densities, are typical. They make it obvious by now that
expansions of secondary (manufacturing plus construction)
sectors remain insufficient, even when dynamic, to absorb
today's available labour supplies, much less those clearly in
prospect during the decades just ahead and beyond. (The
counter-example of South Korea is proving to be especially rare
and even this has been associated with both strongly enforced
constraints against migrants entering Seoul and spectacular
declines in fertility, to a TFR of 1.73 in 1985-1990.)
* The abundant evidence, everywhere in NDC primate and
other large main cities, that especially rapid population
growth, fed by relatively high natural increase plus major
additions from internal migration (in Bombay, Seoul, Sao Paulo,
Cairo, etc.), have far outstripped municipal and national
capacities to provide needed sanitary, health, housing, crime
prevention, fire protection and traffic control services.
* Strong presumptions and widely accepted theory both
support the expectation that relative factor returns are
inversely related to relative factor proportion sizes.
Effectively, this implies relatively reduced labour returns and
increasingly unequal distributions of income. This last is
further backed by the familiar empirical finding by Kuznets that
early or intermediate levels of development and per capita
incomes may well imply increasingly unequal, rather than
equalizing, redistributions of income, a situation similar to
that of many NDCs with still high TFRs (of about 3.5 to 5.5).
Rapid increases of the labour force under conditions of scarce
capital and limited supplies of entrepreneurial and middle-
management skills necessarily pose added obstacles to the early
absorption and subsequent boosting of productivity of newcomer
job seekers. With modifications of details only, such adverse
tendencies cross-cut urban and rural areas as well as agricul-
tural and non-agricultural sectors. In all of these labour
markets, therefore, job seekers outweigh and indeed typically
swamp available job opportunities, cooperant factors of
production and available capacities for providing needed
infrastructure and household amenities.
* The evidence, repeatedly confirmed by the literature
(since, for example, the Joe Wray paper in the 1971 NAS study,
Rapid Population Growth: Consequences and Policy Implications),
that high rates of child-bearing in the NDCs, a main source of
their continued rapid rates of population increase, do serious
damage to maternal and child health, to educational performance
of children, to the social roles, statuses and career prospects
of women, and to mobility opportunities affecting families. All
of these adverse micro-familial consequences of high
reproductivity patterns are typical components of widespread
micro-level welfare conditions: typically, too, they are also
"beyond" GDP recognition, an important omission often overlooked
by development statisticians and therefore analysts as well.
* Not least is the fact that prospective population growth
continues to be the greatest in the very "least developed"
areas, where demographic impediments to socio-economic
development and its hoped-for individual and social welfare
consequences are actually and potentially most serious as well
as probably most resistant to change.
* As to the World Bank's widely cited estimate of a
doubling of NDC per capita incomes in the post-war decades, two
obvious and sufficient rebuttals of its presumably main
implications come immediately to mind even if one assumes
accuracy þ a not small leap of faith. First, the developmental
and welfare significances of this statistic are both much
diminished by the vastly expanding dualisms, hence statistical
variances, separating the successful, economically leading NDCs
from those developmentally still faltering (the Pacific Rim
versus sub-Saharan African regions, for example). And secondly,
rise in the growth rates of NDC average incomes per capita would
surely have been far larger had the Third World as a whole and
its subregional population growth rates been more reduced
through fertility decreases than has in fact been the case. Or
conversely, how would the estimated per capita income gain cited
by the World Bank have been affected if the Third World's
average TFR had not fallen by about one third, hence had its
population size been several hundred millions higher than the
one actually observed? Without World Bank estimates to
accompany the one cited by its economists, it remains incapable
of making an informed judgement of the relative priorities to
be assigned to population versus other development policies.
In sum, today's NDCs, both individually and in aggregate, are
demonstrably incapable of feeding, sheltering, educating, employing
or servicing the great majority of their populations even today,
despite claiming a doubling of income. Why, then, should further
rapid population growth be expected to have equal developmental and
welfare implications than would considerably lower rates of such
growth? And what realistic programme efforts should be allocated by
development planners to the goal of decelerating population growth
to the extent possible by fostering expanded fertility control
behaviour?
Claims that the need to distinguish between population growth
alternatives are secondary, or that rapid growth can reliably be
resolved in a timely manner by market (or for that matter any
foreseeable non-market) forces calls to mind a favourite observation
of a great economist (Jacob Viner) that experts can make mistakes
which the man in the street couldn't dream of.
To investigate whether the above-cited counter-revisionist views
are justified, UNFPA should undertake as soon as possible
(particularly if it wishes to build upon 1974 World Population
Conference recommendations) a series of some 10-15 studies authored
by foremost, non-United Nations and "non-sectarian" analysts on
topics such as "Rapid Population Growth and Education in the Third
World: Developmental Needs and Accommodative Capacities," plus
similar studies for food, municipal and rural community services,
micro-familial welfare statuses, changed roles of women, educational
goals, reduced labour underutilization, and so on. In each case, the
studies should cover main facts and prevailing theories, should
provide empirical assessments of need/demand and accommodation/supply
matches, and should point to ways in which alternative rates of
population growth could affect policy or programme targets and likely
behavioural patterns. Optimally, each study should be undertaken by
authors who could combine expertise on questions of population change
with similar competence in the area of developmental and welfare
consequences being considered as well as in expected linkages between
the two. Balance-of-payments linkages, for example could involve a
foreign-trade analyst working together with an economic demographer;
food linkages, an agricultural economist and economic demographer;
fiscal aspects, a public-finance specialist and economic demographer;
schooling by an educator and sociologist demographer; and so on.
Such relatively concrete, period-specific and sector-specific
reviews would appear to be an especially promising approach to
documenting how population growth has been affecting and will
continue to affect developmental patterns and their welfare
concomitants.
The "gap actual or perceived between current research findings
and the policy community's need for guidance in the population field"
in the important third paragraph of the Statement should in my
opinion be substantially elaborated upon, along the following lines:
Revisionist views on population-development interrelationships,
or population-economic interfaces more generally, can be fairly
summarized as focusing on the effects of aggregate demographic size,
growth and structure on entire-economy change prospects over
macroeconomic (say, within about 10-15 year) time intervals and
longer-run periods. In large part, their attacks during the post-war
decades on "Malthusian orthodoxy" have emphasized findings and
judgements that overall population trends do not pose dominant
obstacles to development even when rapid; that such trends are
neither necessary nor sufficient cause for predicting development
failures; that observed NDC trends appear according to economic and
statistical models to be more nearly neutral than primary
determinants of intermediate-period or long-run economy-wide
development transitions, and added numbers may have positive as well
as negative consequences when viewed developmentally. As an
illustration of the first of these points, the World Bank has
recently been emphasizing that per capita income in the NDCs is
estimated to have doubled during the post-World War II decades,
despite unprecedentedly rapid rates of population expansion.
Such judgements are in part needless updated versions of
empirical propositions long widely accepted and in part conclusions
based on highly suspect analytic approaches.
To begin with the first of these two parts, revisionist efforts
to show that rapid population growth need not prevent long-term
economic development reconfirms what has been progressively
demonstrated for over a century, initially for today's most
industrialized regions and, most recently for a still small but
expanding group of developing countries. High rates of added numbers
even when sustained over considerable periods, it has been readily
observed, have not prevented long-run development and have not been
either necessary or sufficient reasons for explaining cases of
developmental failure. And the possibility that large added numbers
may have positive developmental implications for development, in
particular when such numbers occur in regional situations calling for
enhanced economies of scale and specializations, has been emphasized
ever since Adam Smith. In effect, neither of these generalizations
is "revisionist" and, much more importantly, neither one denies, or
needs even be regarded as seeking to deny, the finding from both
abundant direct observations and widely documented statistical
evidence that sustained rapid population growth has been associated
with outstandingly negative net effects in sectoral connections of
major importance.
In a different category are the recent revisionist claims that
population is likely to be, or may be, a relatively "neutral" factor
with respect to its effects on development. Here the contrary point
to be emphasized is that such claims appear to be based upon various
analytic shortcomings, hence upon numerous bases for scepticism.
Thus, comprehensively formulated entire-economy models used by
revisionists for focusing on demographic change consequences have not
proven themselves to be either reliable predictors of events to come
or to provide satisfactory explanations of interrelations, whether
over macroeconomic time intervals or, especially, over the longer
periods when demographic growth and their determinants acquire large
quantitative dimensions. Thus too, their not-infrequent use of
simplistic single-equation regression models to relate cross-national
GDP or GDP per capita growth rates to population size or change can
be shown to involve large statistical biases, major modelling
specification errors and even possibilities of incorrect slope-sign
indicators. (One reason may well be effects of simultaneity biases,
since income affects population even while population affects income.
Further biases to be expected stem from the fact that population
levels or changes are likely correlated with omitted main causal
variables of income changes. Further biases are associated with
failures to allow for the indirect effects of population on income
via its effects on individual non-demographic variables influencing
income, for example, educational opportunities in poor economies,
their urban-rural distributions, their age-related consumption-demand
patterns and their labour-force supply characteristics.) These
biases are all quite apart from recently increasing factual
regression-type indications (themselves subject to analogous biases),
that statistically significant inverse (negative) income-population
relations have begun to appear since 1970s, for the first time since
the end of World War II.
A third variant of revisionist claims revolves about the finding
that demographic influences appear to be weakly or indeterminately
related to savings and investment and hence to productivity and
output. Somehow lost in such often-emphasized claims are the facts
that national savings levels and trends are aggregates of household,
non-household and government saving components plus a foreign savings
component (likely to be especially significant for NDC economies),
and that only the first of these four is relatively directly related
to demographic size, growth or structural characteristics. Yet
specific empirical household savings connections to national
population determinants in the Third World have just begun to
explored according to World Bank economists, who have recently issued
what they describe as the first such study.
Judgemental conclusions based on such weak conceptual and
analytic foundations fall into deep shadow when confronted with the
fact that the 1-to-2 billions (depending on definitions) who live
under minimal developmental conditions in the NDCs are increasing at
rates more than twice as high as rates existing among the early
industrializing population of the 19th century in Europe.
Finally, a number of emerging economic and demographic trends
could turn out to imply increasingly negative impacts of rapidly
rising numbers on welfare levels in the NDCs. One is that the Third
World's economic growth rates have been diminishing at the same time
that setbacks in national production and employment have become more
frequent, comparing the years before and after the early 1970s.
Continuation of such patterns would almost surely lead to reduced
welfare improvement potentials or more frequent welfare downturns in
the NDCs, the more so since their mortality and population-growth
rates have become much less closely linked to income levels and
fluctuations, due to greatly expanded death and disease controls by
Governments. A second potentially ominous element is that average
population growth rates in the NDCs, excluding China, have stopped
declining, or changed very little on average since about 1960. A
third is that the Third World's numbers of aged likely to become
dependent on public-sector support programmes appear certain to rise
at very rapid rates in future, judging from recent decadal trends,
from available United Nations projections concerning upper-age
survival chances even under relatively conservative assumptions, and
from the prospect that rates of urbanization are likely to remain
high for at least another generation. A fourth prospect no longer
to be discounted is that severe fiscal constraints in the
industrialized regions are likely to continue; if so, this could have
ominous implications for the amounts of international economic,
health and family planning forms of assistance made available to
Third World aid recipients. Meanwhile, a fifth surely negative
factor is that heavy foreign debt overhangs in large parts of the
developing world continue to constrain national fiscal capacities for
coping with both traditional and newly emerging social policy
shortcomings.
In sum, I am in favour of much more assertive and less bookish
approach to the Statement's contents and expository tone.