What Happened to the Population Explosion?

by Alan Tonelson

Don’t break out the champagne just yet, population experts warn in the wake of two separate reports last fall claiming that the world population explosion may be petering out.

Don’t break out the champagne just yet, population experts warn in the wake of two separate reports last fall claiming that the world population explosion may be petering out.

The studies, by a University of Chicago research team and the US Census Bureau, have also rekindled a debate that’s been raging among demographers for years over why birthrates decline. Riding on the outcome could be the shape of population and economic development policies for the rest of this century.

Sociologists Donald J. Bogue and Amy Ong Tsui of the University of Chicago kicked off the latest population controversy with a study titled Declining World Fertility. Their research, made public October 18, found that the average number of births a woman can be expected to have in her lifetime (the fertility rate) had dropped from 4.6 to 4.1 from 1968 to 1975.

Bogue and Tsui also predicted that world population would total ”only" 5.8 billion by the year 2000-an estimate several hundred million lower than World Bank and UN projections of 6 and 6.3 billion, respectively. "If recent trends continue," they declared, "the world population crisis appears resolvable." Current world population is about 4.2 billion.

One month later, these findings seemed to be borne out by the US Census Bureau, which announced that global population growth had slowed from more than 2 percent annually in the mid1950s and 1960s to 1.9 percent in the 1970s. Census officials say that while the shift isn’t large, it has come much sooner than expected.

The Census Bureau’s findings are generally accepted by demographers, but they’re not so certain about the Bogue-Tsui figures and downright skeptical about the assertion that the population bomb has been defused.

One of Bogue’s fiercest critics is Justin Blackwelder, President of the Washington- based Environmental Fund. "He’s been making these projections for 20 years, and if we go back, we find that he’s invariably been wrong on the underestimating side, " Blackwelder says. He adds that the World Bank and UN projections convincingly refute Bogue’s figures.

Stephen Isaacs of Columbia University accepts Bogue’s results, but observes, "In some of the underdeveloped countries, the rate of population growth is so dangerously high that any rejoicing is very premature."

Similarly, Maureen Lewis of the US Agency for International Development argues that "some developments are encouraging in the context of a decrease, but in the developing world the numbers are still so high it’s hard to derive much comfort from them. "

Bogue says his projections differ from the World Bank’s and the UN’s because his data is more recent. The UN, in particular, "works with official data sent in by specific countries, which tends to be slow" coming in, he explains. "They’re very conservative about substituting their own estimates. "

Bogue’s study included the results of sample fertility surveys, as well as local data compiled by several demographic institutes around the world engaged in fertility research.

According to a senior UN population official, there are four good reasons to think that a turning point in the drive to control population growth is at hand, particularly in the third world.

The world is rapidly urbanizing, he notes, and city life seems to lead to smaller families. In addition, as modernization proceeds, traditional values which prize large families lose their grip in the developing countries.

The increased availability of birth-control services makes it easier than ever before to control family size. And finally, statistical studies show that once fertility rates begin failing, it’s very hard to bring them back up again.

Even more controversial than their year 2000 predictions is Bogue and Tsui’s claim that family planning, rather than economic development, has been mainly responsible for slowing third world fertility.

Population experts have observed that in Europe and North America, fertility rates tended to fall as national wealth increased. But will this "demographic transition" take place in the developing societies of Asia, Africa and Latin America? The question split the ranks of population experts wide open in 1974 at the World Population Conference in Bucharest, Romania.

There, in a highly charged atmosphere of North-South confrontation, the third world attacked the wealthy countries’ position that development efforts would get nowhere unless family planning first halted soaring birthrates.

"Development is the best pill," developing country spokesmen insisted, arguing that birth control would not slow down population growth without economic advances.

Five years after Bucharest, the debate over the relative merits of birth control and development continues, with early victory in sight for neither side. Yet despite third world claims at the 1974 conference, recent research indicates that birth control efforts have played a major role in checking population rise.

A massive study of fertility decline in 94 developing countries from 1965-1975 conducted by W. Parker Mauldin and Bernard Berelson of the New York-based Population Council demonstrated that "on balance, family planning programs have a significant, independent effect over and above the effect of socioeconomic factors. "

Mauldin and Berelson point out that the greatest third world fertility declines have occurred in countries with good development records and strong family planning programs, but argue that in some instances, birth control has been more important than development.

Moreover, several other reports released this year suggest that the relationship between population and development is anything but clear-cut.

An analysis of Europe’s demographic transition done by Princeton University’s Office of Population Research, for example, shows that fertility decline and modernization did go hand in hand for the continent as a whole in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. But the link often broke down on the local level. Even nationally, fertility in largely rural, Catholic France began to fall nearly 100 years earlier than in Britain, which led the Industrial Revolution.

The UN population analyst quoted above notes that in many development regions in the 1940s and 1950s, notably Latin America, birthrates and per capita income rose simultaneously. As conditions improved, people felt for a time that the could afford more children, a pattern that may be appearing in China’s Kwangtung province, according to a December 6 Washington Post report.

As Isaacs puts it, "Population researchers are finding that countries vary and that there is no magic turning point or takeoff point for the demographic transition. "

Other specialists maintain that only certain kinds of third world development patterns produce fertility declines. Robert Repetto, of Harvard University’s Center for Population Studies, has linked fertility decline with improvements in income distribution.

Growing income has its greatest effects on the fertility rates of poor families, he writes in a forthcoming article, and therefore raising poor family incomes should be a top priority for any third world country bent on cutting its birthrates.

Gradually, population experts are coming to realize that both development and family planning are needed to deal with the third world’s population problem.

As Repetto says, "No one’s one hundred percent right and no one’s one hundred percent wrong. The question population research has to answer now is, ‘What’s the mix?’"

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