Malthus and the Less Developed World: The Pivotal Role of India
John C. Caldwell,
Emeritus Professor of Demography, Australian National University, Canberra Malthus's Essay had a powerful influence on how English-speaking people interpreted population issues. This was particularly true with regard to India, Britain's huge colony, which, unlike other large agrarian countries of the less developed world, was progressively described by census statistics and other demographic observations. Its administrators and civil servants, both British and Indian, increasingly saw it in Malthusian terms. This tradition persisted into the twentieth century and played a powerful role in the establishment of national family planning programs in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and beyond. In turn the British experience in India helped to shape the attitudes of the English-speaking peoples to poor, densely populated countries and rapid population growth.[24, no. 4 (Dec 98): 675–696] Population and Reproductive Health: An Economic Framework for Policy Evaluation
Jere R. Behrman, Professor of Economics, University of Pennsylvania
James C. Knowles, economic consultant, Chapel Hill, North Carolina This article provides a standard economic framework to evaluate policies in the population and reproductive health fields and illustrates its use in order to facilitate cross-disciplinary exchanges between economists and others working in these areas. This framework justifies policy interventions to increase efficiency and productivity and to redistribute resources. The article illustrates this framework with a cost-benefit analysis of a safe motherhood project in Indonesia and a distributional analysis of family planning and reproductive health services in Vietnam. Application of the policy framework to a number of resource and finance issues in population and reproductive health suggests that a significant program bias favors publicly provided services and hinders the emergence of a more efficient mix of private and public providers competing on an equal basis.[24, no. 4 (Dec 98): 697–737]
Immigration Policy Prior to the 1930s: Labor Markets, Policy Interactions, and Globalization Backlash
Ashley S. Timmer, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Duke University Jeffrey G. Williamson, Laird Bell Professor of Economics, Harvard University What determines immigration policy? The literature here is not nearly as mature as that for trade policy, so this article must be viewed as an initial effort to establish the main empirical outlines. The authors construct an index of immigration policy for five countries of immigration—Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, and the United States—for 1860–1930, that is, during and shortly after the age of mass migration. The exercise reveals that the doors to the New World did not suddenly slam shut on immigrants after World War I, as is typically illustrated by citing the passage of the Emergency Quota Act by the US Congress in 1921. Instead, there was a gradual closing of the doors, although the rate and timing of the closing varied across countries. The authors find that poor wage performance and the perceived threat from more, low-quality foreign workers were the main influences on shifts in immigration policy. They also offer some support for the idea that immigration policy was as much an interactive process as were the tariff policies of the time.[24, no. 4 (Dec 98): 739–771]
The Onset of Fertility Transition in Pakistan (PDF)
Zeba A. Sathar, Associate, Population Council, Islamabad, Pakistan
John B. Casterline, Senior Associate, Policy Research Division, Population Council Recent trends in fertility and contraceptive prevalence indicate that the fertility transition in Pakistan has begun in the 1990s. Before that decade, the total fertility rate had exceeded six births per woman for at least three decades, and fewer than 10 percent of married women practiced contraception. The most recent survey data, collected in 1996–97, show a total fertility rate of 5.3 births per woman and a contraceptive prevalence rate of 24 percent. Underlying this development are macroeconomic trends that have led to widespread economic distress at the household level, and social changes that have diluted the influence of extended kin and resulted in greater husband-wife convergence in reproductive decisionmaking. The direct causes of declining fertility are a crystallization of existing desires for smaller families, along with a decline in family size desires and a reduction in the social, cultural, and psychic costs of contraception. Improvements in family planning services have contributed little to the onset of fertility decline but could be decisive in sustaining the decline over the next decade.[24, no. 4 (Dec 98): 773–796]
Notes and Commentary - Population, Carbon Emissions, and Global Warming: Comment
Paul de Sa
- Toward a Per Capita-Based Climate Treaty: Reply
Frederick A. B. Meyerson
Data and Perspectives Low-Skilled Immigrants and the Changing American Labor Market
María E. Enchautegui, Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Low-skilled immigrants are an integral part of the US labor market: almost 30 percent of US workers without a high school diploma are immigrants. If current trends persist, immigrants will become the majority of US low-skilled workers in the near future. While low-skilled immigrants maintain strong employment levels, they are concentrated in the most menial low-skilled jobs, and their wages are declining relative to those of natives. The substantial deterioration of the economic status of low-skilled immigrants in the last decade raises important policy questions concerning ways to address the plight of this growing segment of US workers. [24, no. 4 (Dec 98): 811–824]
Archives - Francis Hutcheson on the Rights of Society
Book Reviews - The Mismeasure of Nations: A Review Essay on the Human Development Report 1998, reviewed by Ian Castles
- Styles of Population Economics: A Review Essay on Mark R. Rosenzweig and Oded Stark (eds.), Handbook of Population and Family Economics, reviewed by Mark Perlman
- Henri Leridon and Laurent Toulemon, Démographie: Approche statistique et dynamique des populations and Jean Bourgeois-Pichat, La dynamique des populations: Populations stables, semi-stables et quasi-stables, reviewed by John R. Wilmoth
- Gavin W. Jones, Robert M. Douglas, John C. Caldwell, and Rennie M. D'Souza (eds.), The Continuing Demographic Transition, reviewed by Tim Dyson
- John M. Riddle, Eve's Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West, reviewed by Gigi Santow
- Ochiai Emiko, The Japanese Family System in Transition: A Sociological Analysis of Family Change in Postwar Japan, reviewed by Robert D. Retherford
Short Reviews - José Alvarado and John Creedy, Population Ageing, Migration and Social Expenditure
- Milica Zarkovic Bookman, The Demographic Struggle for Power: The Political Economy of Demographic Engineering in the Modern World
- Murray Friedman and Nancy Isserman (eds.), The Tribal Basis of American Life: Racial, Religious, and Ethnic Groups in Conflict
- Frank Furedi, Population and Development: A Critical Introduction
- Anrudh Jain (ed.), Do Population Policies Matter? Fertility and Politics in Egypt, India, Kenya, and Mexico
- National Research Council, Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change, Environmentally Significant Consumption: Research Directions
- United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, World Urbanization Prospects: The 1996 Revision
- United Nations Children's Fund, Education for All? The MONEE Project Regional Monitoring Report No. 5
Documents - Population Aging and the US Federal Budget
- The 1998 Revision of the United Nations
- Population Projections
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