Trade, population growth, and the environment in developing countries

We examine pollution in a developing country where fertility is endogenous and wealth increases welfare through status. When the country has defective environmental laws, it has a comparative advantage in capital-intensive “dirty” goods. Gains from trade due to trade liberalization then increase income and boost population growth. With strong incentives to save, they also stimulate investment, which hampers population growth. Because population growth crowds out labor supply, production of capital-intensive dirty goods first increases and then decreases. This yields a typical environmental Kuznets path: pollution increases at the earlier stages but decreases at the later stages of development.     

Migration, fertility, and aging in stable populations

Fertility is below replacement level in all European countries, and population growth is expected to decline in the coming decades. Increasing life expectancy will accentuate concomitant aging of the population. Migration has been seen as a possible means to decelerate aging. In this article, I introduce a stable, open-population model in which cohort net migration is proportional to births. In this case, the migration-fertility trade-off can be studied with particular ease. I show that although migration can increase the growth rate, which tends to make the age distribution younger, it also has an opposite effect because of its typical age pattern. I capture the effect of the age pattern of net migration in a migration-survivor function. The effect of net migration on growth is quantified with data from 17 European countries. I show that some countries already have a level of migration that will lead to stationarity. For other countries with asymptotically declining population, migration still provides opportunities for slowing down aging of the population as a whole.     

Population growth,changing agricultural practices,and environmental degradation in Zaire

This paper examines linkages between the demographic changes taking place in Zaire, particularly overall population growth and rapid urbanization, changes in agricultural practices, and related environmental degradation. Pressures to feed Zaire's rapidly increasing urban population, which fall on a rural population that has been growing relatively slowly in recent years, as well as population growth and increased population density in certain areas of the country, have resulted in changes in agricultural practices that are described in the paper. These changes in turn are leading to declining soil fertility, deforestation, and degradation of the natural resource base. Given present technology and the state of Zaire's economy, the changes in agricultural practices that have emerged in response to population growth, increased population density, and growth in demand for food production do not appear to be sustainable in the long run.     

Gender Inequality,Maternal Mortality and Inclusive Growth in Nigeria

The relevance of women in contributing to inclusive growth and consequently economic development in Nigeria cannot be overemphasized. Women play important social, economic and productive roles in any economy. Maternal mortality rate refers to the annual number of deaths of women from pregnancy-related causes per 100,000 live births, and Nigeria’s rate is still relatively high at about 630 when compared with the figures of the developed countries. For inclusive growth to be achieved in Nigeria, women should not be neglected and marginalized so they can contribute their quota to the growth of the country, but maternal mortality rate needs to be reduced because it is only the living that can make contributions to growth. Thus, this study examined the long run effect of gender inequality, maternal mortality and inclusive growth in Nigeria using time series data spanning from 1985 to 2017, and employed the ARDL econometric technique. The results showed that gender inequality and maternal mortality have negative impacts on inclusive growth in Nigeria. Therefore, the study recommends that women should be properly taken care of during pregnancy so that the maternal mortality rate can be reduced and hence they will be able to make meaningful contributions to the growth of the Nigerian economy.

     

R&D, human capital, fertility, and growth

This paper analyzes how the decisions of individuals to have children and acquire skills affect long-term growth. We investigate a model in which technical progress, human capital, and population arise endogenously. In such an economy, the presence of distortions (such as monopolistic competition, knowledge spillover, and duplication effects) leads the decentralized long-run growth to be either insufficient or excessive. We show that this result depends on the relative contribution of population and human capital in the determination of long-term growth, i.e., on how the distortions affect the trade-off between the quantity of offsprings and the quality of the family members.     

Mortality,marriage, and growth in pre-industrial populations

It has been widely assumed that in pre-industrial European populations postponement of marriage was a major check on fertility, and that marriage was contingent upon access to a livelihood in the form of a homestead or a craft. Death made room for new families, and the age at inheritance might therefore be an index of the age at marriage. High mortality should then mean early marriage and high fertility. When the effect of a uniform increase in the force of mortality on the “natural rate of growth” is estimated quantitatively, it is found that fertility response is of the same magnitude as the change in mortality so that within a wide range mortality differentials alone would not suffice to account for persistent differentials in growth rates. The assumption of a reasonably effective control through the prudential check is thus strengthened.     

On demographic transition,structural change,and economic growth and stagnation

The paper analyzes an economy with an agrarian and an industrial sector. Demand is determined by Engel's Law. Population growth follows a non‐linear income dependent path according to the theory of demographic transition. In case of decreasing returns to scale in the agrarian sector the existence of a stable low‐income equilibrium with high population growth can be shown. If this equilibrium is globally unstable, the system evolves towards a steady‐state of perpetual economic growth and low population growth. The path of demographic transition coincides with a path of structural change from an economy specialized in agriculture to a fully industrialized economy. The introduction of an income dependent savings rate allows the interpretation of the low‐income equilibrium as a limit cycle and, therefore, the explanation of high fluctuations in population growth and per capita income in least developed economies.     

Environmental Protection,Population Change,and Economic Development in the Rural Western United States

This research analyzes the relationship between protected federal lands (wilderness, national parks, national monuments and roadless areas) and nearby communities in the rural western United States. Opponents of environmental protection claim that protected lands limit the growth of nearby communities by locking up potentially valuable natural resources and restricting mining, logging and grazing. Others claim that extractive industries are no longer the backbone of rural economies— instead, the presence of protected federal lands encourages growth by attracting tourists and new residents. A geographic information system is used to calculate the proportion of protected lands occurring within 50 miles of the center of each western county. This calculation, in combination with detailed county-level data, indicates that environmental protection is correlated with relatively rapid population growth and with relatively rapid income and employment growth.     

Policies on population,land use,and environment in Rwanda

The paper first describes the interactions between population growth, land use, and environment in Rwanda, a small, densely populated landlocked nation in the East-African Great Lakes region. These interactions are modelled using a conceptual framework applied to the neighboring Kivu region in Zaire, but adapted to the Rwandan case study. Second, the paper contends that the emphasis put on increasing agricultural production, mostly through the use of marginal land, as well as the lack of a timely implementation of a family planning program and a national population policy, have led to a worsening of the interactions between population growth, land use, and environment. In an attempt to demonstrate this hypothesis, demography-driven projection scenarios are applied to the agricultural colonization and intensification processes.     

Land tenure, population, and long-run growth

This paper brings together the development literature on land tenure with current research on population and long-run growth. Landowners make a decision between fixed rent, fixed wage, and sharecropping contracts to hire tenants to operate their land. The choice of tenure contract affects the share of output going to tenants, and within a simple unified growth model, this affects the relative price of food and therefore fertility. Fixed wage contracts elicit the lowest fertility rate and fixed rent contracts the highest, with sharecropping as an intermediate case. The implications of this for long-run growth depend on the assumptions one makes about scale effects in the aggregate economy. With increasing returns to scale, as in several models of innovation, fixed rent contracts imply higher growth through a market size effect. Without such increasing returns, though, fixed rent contracts reduce output per capita through a depressing effect on accumulation.     

Stress-related growth, coming out, and internalized homonegativity in lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth. An examination of stress-related growth within the minority stress model

This study investigates how young lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals deal with coming out and how perceived personal growth may result from that experience. We considered stress-related growth as a mediator between coming-out experiences and internalized homonegativity (IH). Our sample was taken from an online survey and is comprised of 502 LGBs aged 14-30. The social environment's acceptance of an individual's sexual orientation and the individual's social identification influence stress-related growth. Several coming-out indicators influence internalized homonegativity and, although growth perception does not function as a mediator between coming out and internalized homonegativity, it has a direct effect on IH.     

Learning-by-doing,population pressure,and the theory of demographic transition

The present paper discusses the long-run effects of two interdependent relations between economic and population growth. According to a frequently used formulation of the population-push hypothesis, learning-by-doing effects in production lead to increasing returns to scale and, therefore, to a positive correlation between economic and population growth. In accordance to the theory of demographic transition the population growth rate initially increases with rising income levels and then declines. Regarding this relationship, the existence and stability of a low-income equilibrium and a high-income equilibrium will be shown in a neoclassical growth model. Under plausible conditions a demo-economic transition from the first to the second steady-state takes place. The result yields a meaningful interpretation of the population-push hypothesis, which is consistent with the empirical findings on the correlation between economic and population growth. Received March 8, 1996 / Accepted October 24, 1996     

Stabilization,birth waves,and the surge in the elderly

This study examines the transition of a population to stability following a shift to a new fixed set of vital rates. Specifically, the authors develop a simple discrete population model and use it to derive an explicit solution for the birth trajectory. "The new vital rates interact with the population's initial age composition and generate birth waves whose amplitude and attenuation depend on the ratio of ultimate to initial growth and on the new pattern of stable net maternity. A greater change in growth and a later stable net maternity pattern produce larger fluctuations in the number of births. Stabilization begins at the youngest ages and proceeds upward. Sixty years after the shift, the birth waves have largely disappeared and the proportion under age 15 approximates the stable level implied by the new rates. Those patterns are manifest in the stabilization of both observed and Coale-Demeny model stable populations." (SUMMARY IN FRE)     

Life expectancy, money, and growth

We examine the effect of an increase in life expectancy on portfolio choices of individuals and, thereby, on economic growth in a simple endogenous growth model populated by overlapping generations, in which money is introduced based on the money-in-the-utility-function approach. It is shown that an increase in longevity raises the balanced growth rate and lowers the inflation rate, offsetting the Tobin effect, if spillovers from accumulated capital to labor productivity sufficiently raise wage income and real savings, and, if not, it may retard economic growth and aggravate inflation. Under plausible conditions, the former will be the case.

Political instability, gender discrimination, and population growth in developing countries

This paper introduces gender discrimination and population growth into a model of political economy. The government keeps up the military for the sake of political instability in the country. It is shown that if the risk of internal conflicts is high, then the government needs a bigger military and a larger supply of young men for it. The government is then willing to boost population growth by keeping women outside the production (e.g. neglecting their education or restricting their movement). Some empirical evidence on the interdependence of political instability, population growth, and gender discrimination is provided.

顺德市人口、资源、环境与可持续发展

本文模拟了顺德市在不实行计划生育政策的条件下的人口增长情况 ,结果发现由于计划生育 ,在 1971- 1998年间 ,顺德市少生了 5 0多万人口 ,从而使顺德市的人口、资源、环境在经济高速发展的情况下仍能基本协调。文章也分析了顺德市目前的人口、资源与环境可持续发展的状况和问题 ,并提出了一些建议     

Population growth, age structure, and environmental impact

We develop and use a simulation model that considers sustainability on several levels by calculating production, consumption, investment, population growth/change, and environmental pollution less environmental quality upgrading investment. Our model allows us to consider population's impact on per capita consumption as well as the social interdependencies among populations, per capita consumption, and technology. Under certain population growth scenarios we find some countries ultimately consume less pollution, and less pollution is consumed on a system-wide basis. We arrive at this apparently counterintutive result because: (1) we explicitly model the decision to invest in environmental quality upgrading; and (2) we consider the impact of population age structure on investment, not only the impact of total population and population growth on total consumption.     

Capital accumulation,aspiration adjustment,and population growth: limit cycles in an Easterlin-type model

"One of the recent interesting hypotheses of population growth is due to Easterlin who suggests the possibility of self-generating fluctuations in birth numbers. The present paper tries to answer the question whether feedback mechanisms produce persistent oscillations in population growth. A system of two nonlinear differential equations for the per capita capital stock and the aspiration level is studied by a phase portrait analysis. Using the Poincare-Bendixson theorem we derive sufficient conditions for the existence of a stable limit cycle." (SUMMARY IN FRE)     

Population and Upland Crop Production in Nang Rong,Thailand

This paper estimates village-level models of the effects of population variables on the area devoted to upland crop production in Nang Rong district, Thailand. The expansion of upland crops is part of the growth of market agriculture in Nang Rong, and a correlate of deforestation in this setting, The results show that population density (measured as density of village settlement) negatively affects area in upland crops while population growth has a positive effect. Changes in land use associated with population change appear to radiate outward from nuclear village centers. As cash economies are established in rural settings, household formation requires a source of income as well as a subsistence stake. Growth in the population of households is a stronger predictor of the area in upland crops than growth in the number of persons.     

Age structure,education, and the transmission of technical change

The significance of deviations from exponential population growth to economic development requires the construction of growth models that explicitly recognize demographic forces as a potential source of nonstationarities. This paper uses an overlapping generations approach to analyze the impact of population aging on technological innovations in the production process. Specifically, it is assumed that a newly invented technology can be used only if the production unit engages human labor that has been trained for this task (labor-embodied technical change). In a model of overlapping generations 1-sector optimal growth, there are 3 basic components: population, education and labor, and production and investment. An individual who has been in school continuously from the time of birth embodies, according to this model, the most up-to-date form of human capital. When the population growth rate is high, technological innovations are achieved largely through the constant influx of recently educated young people into the labor force. However, when population declines lead to a slowing down of this influx, increased adult education is necessary to stimulate the continued introduction of innovations into the productive process. The form of the optimality conditions, the comparative statistics properties, and the form of the nonstationary optimal economic growth path in this model are similar to those in the Van Imhoff model of homogeneous human capital.