EVOLUTION OF THE RECIPROCAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POPULATION VARIABLES AND DEVELOPMENTAL ISSUES
Abstract
The concerns and issues of the relationship between demographic dynamics/population variables and development could be traced as far back as 500 BC and also during the Ancient Chinese, Greeks and Roman Empire.
However, since the 18th century, the relationship between the two systems (population and development) gained international concerns and attention. It was during this century that a clergy man,, named Thomas Robert Malthus, an economist and demographer (born February 1766 in Rookery, England and died in December1834), had been best known for his theory that population growth would always tend to outrun the food supply and that betterment of mankind is impossible without stern limits on human reproduction. In our time, this thinking is commonly referred to as Malthusianism, entitled as “An Essay on the Principle of Population”.
Overtime, the Malthusian population growth notion sparked debates which gained momentum and featured into the international political agenda after the 1945 establishment of the United Nations. Accordingly, since early 1970’s, sentiments started to express that rapid population growth was a hindrance to development in the third world contries and hence, argued by the modern Neo-Malthusian capitalist oriented group that direct “birth Control” should be introduced as the only condition to enable couples to limit their fertility thereby curbing the high population growth to be covered by the available resources.
However, the idea of the direct birth control alone was counter-argued by socialist-oriented group that “development is the best contraceptive” and hence, the UN 1974 Bucharest World Population Conference (WPC) and the UN 1994 Cairo International Conference of Population and Development (ICPD) were organized and finally elaborated that the reduction of human fertility levels, patterns and trends should be integrated with the developmental stages of a given society.
Hence, the interest of this review paper/article is, therefore, focused on looking at the differences between the Malthusian/Neo-Malthusian historical hypothesis and the contemporary perspectives in the interaction between population variables and developmental stages..
