Population and Poverty: New Views on an Old Controversy

http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/2804102.html

Using this argument, neo-Malthusians played a key role during the 1960s and 1970s in efforts to mobilize the world's wealthy developed countries to provide financial aid to support government-administered family planning programs in developing countries. Through such international assistance policies, governments and nongovernmental organizations in developing countries with rapid rates of population growth received support that enabled them to develop or expand access to family planning services.³

• Others, however, believe that economic policies determine poverty reduction and that contraception is a "private good." Not everyone agreed that expanded family planning programs would be effective in reducing poverty. Economists were quick to point out that even if high fertility and high proportions of the population living in poverty were correlated, this correlation would not imply causality. In fact, the relationship could run in the opposite direction: Poverty could be the cause of high fertility. Poor people often want more children because children represent wealth, provide household labor and are the only form of social security available to parents in their old age. 

Furthermore, economists questioned whether reduced rates of population growth actually have positive effects on savings and investment. They pointed out that even though the population in developing regions doubled between 1950 and 1985, this had not prevented many countries in those regions from raising overall living standards.⁴

In the mid-1980s, an influential review of the evidence on the link between population and economic development conducted by the National Research Council concluded that while demographic factors might play some role in determining a country's prospects for economic progress, they were of limited importance compared with such considerations as poor economic policies, bad governance, corruption and the lack of natural resources.⁵This high-level report further undercut the rationale for supporting family planning programs on the grounds that these would help reduce poverty. By 1990, few economists believed that the population factor mattered. In the view of such skeptics, decisions about family size and reproduction are a private issue, and contraceptive practice is a "private good" whose supply is better left to market forces than to government bureaucrats.⁶

---Steve