Paul Demeny

Population and the invisible hand

This paper discusses the validity of the belief that the invisible hand can work to shape population processes. It also comments on the contemporary policy agenda and the debates that surround it. The outcome of the invisible hand is an uncoordinated social process based on the self-seeking actions of a multitude of independent agents. Demographic change becomes a matter for public concern whenever it can plausibly be assumed that such modifications are both desirable and possible. The workings of the invisible hand are not always for the better. Malthus a firm believer in the invisible hand in effect assumed that people are full masters of their fate acting in isolation and that 1 way they can improve their material standing is by exercising prudent judgment when making choices including choices in demographic matters. Capitalist development in the West ostensibley left most facets of demographic behavior to the individual and to the individual couple. Major forces that condition individual choices are however determined by forces outside individual control. There are 4 areas of fertility-affecting influences; the deceasing economic benefit and the increasing direct cost of children to parents; the rising opportunity cost of children; the socialization of old-age support; and the confluence of demographic change and political institutions that effect the pattern of income redistribution by the state.

Observations on Population Policy and Population Program in Bangladesh

The demographic target of Bangladesh population program is reduction of the population growth rate from 3% per annum to 2.8% between FY75 and FY78 and plans envisage a sizable delivery system with emphasis on modern contraceptive technology. In terms of the largely peasant culture and poor economic conditions of the country capital investment will be high per births averted and the program will compete for goods already in short supply. Estimates of the potential demand for modern contraceptives may also be unrealistic; one survey found that while 62% of a sample population of Bangladesh wives reported knowledge of a program method of contraception only 3.7% were using any form of birth control. The scale and highly centralized character of current program organization inhibit efficiency. Quasi-automatic controls could be introduced through the imposition of user fees and decentralization would reduce the chain of command and increase supervisory efficiency particularly if local governments were given control over total program expenditures and internal allocation. Government policy promoting socioeconomic improvement is most likely to increase fertility control motivation. Incentive schemes concerning sterilization and family size could influence fertility behavior. Priority should be given to the promotion and acceptance of an indigenous political-economic leadership in each of 65000 villages of Bangladesh to establish a collective understanding of population growth as a factor in environmental conditions and quality.

Re-linking fertility behavior and economic security in old age: a pronatalist reform.

This note discusses the case for and outlines the broad contours of an institutional innovation that developed countries might wish to consider if they are confronted with the prospect of sustained below-replacement level fertility. The proposed institutional reform stays within the frame of reference of the armamentarium of pronatalist policies now applied or contemplated in highly developed countries with below-replacement fertility insofar as it relies upon harnessing material incentives to induce an increase in aggregate parental propensity to have children. The reform however breaks away from the focus of the familiar pronatalist policy package on modifying the current or near-term economic status of families. Its objective instead is to reestablish the direct relationship that existed between individual fertility behavior and individual prospects for old-age economic security before modern economic advances and concomitant cultural changes decisively weakened that linkage. To achieve that objective the reform would earmark a socially agreed-upon fraction of the compulsory contribution from earnings that flows into the common pool from which pay-as-you-go national social security schemes are now financed and transfer that fraction to individual contributors live parents as an additional entitlement. The rules governing the distribution of receipts from the common pool would not be affected by this transfer.

A perspective on long-term population growth.

This paper presents some of the results of projections prepared by the World Bank in 1983 for all the worlds countries. The projections (presented against a background of recent demographic trends as estimated by the United Nations) trace the approach of each individual country to a stationary state. Implications of the underlying fertility and mortality assumptions are shown mainly in terms of time trends of total population to the year 2100 annual rates of growth and absolute annual increments. These indices are shown for the largest individual countries for world regions and for country groupings according to economic criteria. The detailed predictive performance of such projections is likely to be poor but the projections indicate orders of magnitude characterizing certain aggregate demographic phenomena whose occurrence is highly probable and set clearly interpretable reference points useful in discussing contemporary issues of policy. (authors)

A reconsideration of negro-white mortality differentials in the united states

ResumenEste trabajo resume los resultados de una investigacion sabre la validez de las dijcrcnciales de mortalidad entre blancos y neqros, como se preseniasi en las tables de vida oficiales desde el inicio del siglo.En primer lugar, se ha derivado niveles de mortalidad y diferenciales por encima de la primera infancia sin usar los registros oiiales exisienies, mediante la interpretacion de series acumulativas de tasas de sobrevida dediez años, implicitas en los registros del censo, para nativos blancos y negros. Los resultados estan de acuerdo, en general, can las cifras oficiales, especialmente para hombres.En segundo lugar, los niveles de mortalidad y diferenciales en la primera infancia se han esiimado extrapolando los valores oficiales e5 mediante tablas de vida modelos; esto es, por el procedimiento analitico que se seguiría en ausencia de información directa sobre la mortalidad en la primera infancia. A menos que se asuma que los patrones de mortalidad par edad para los Negros de Estados Unidos se desviaran extremadamente de aquellos encontrados en poblaeionee can censos y estadísticas vitales confiables, uno debe concluir que las cifras oficiales subestiman, en forma manifiesta, la mortalidad de Negros en la primera infancia, cuando menos para el período de 1910-40. Se deduce que durante esas décades; las diferenciales de mortalidad entre Negros y Blancos, en términos de expectativa de vida al momenta del nacimiento, fueron tambier: sustancialmente más altas de lo que surgieren las estimaciones oficiales.SummaryThis paper summarizes the results of an investigation of the validity of Negro-white mortality differentials as reflected in the series of official United States life tables since the turn of the century. Pertinent excerpts from these often-quoted tables are reproduced in Appendix Table A-1 for convenient reference. The paper divides into two main parts.First, mortality levels and differentials beyond early childhood are derived, without use of the existing vital records, by interpreting the series of ten-year cumulative survival rates implicit in the census records for native whites and for Negroes. The results are in general agreement with the official figures, particularly for males.Second, mortality levels and differentials in early childhood are estimated by extrapolating the official 1)5 values via model life tables; that is, by the analytical procedure that would be followed in the absence of direct information on early childhood mortality. Unless it is assumed that age patterns of death for United States Negroes were extremely deviant from those found in populations with reliable census and vital statistics, one must conclude that the official figures grossly underestimate early childhood mortality for Negroes, at least for the period, 1910-40. It follows that, during those decades, Negro-white mortality differentials in terms of expectation of life at birth were also substantially higher than is suggested by the official estimates.

Bucharest, Mexico City, and Beyond

Although the World Population Conference held at Bucharest in 1974 resulted in a Plan of Action endorsed by all participants subsequent actions of governments were often at variance with the language of the Plan. Some of the population policies pursued in India and China postBucharest illustrate this proposition. While in its Recommendations the 1984 International Conference on Population in Mexico City reaffirmed and further developed the policy approaches adopted in the Bucharest Plan these Recommendations too are likely to prove poor predictors of future government actions. 2 reasons that suggest this conclusion are discussed in this note. 1st the Recommendations reflect an inflated view of what governments already overextended in their program commitments are capable of accomplishing. 2ndly the Conference failed to provide realistic guidelines that would help to resolve the conflict at the heart of the population problem: the conflict between individual and collective interests. (authors modified) (summaries in ENG FRE SPA)

Tradeoffs between human numbers and material standards of living.

Environment is contrasted with nature in that the later exists independently of human beings while the former is the later seen through the eyes of humans. Human presence and activity modify the environment. The magnitude of the impact is related to our numbers but the magnitude and many of the characteristics are not fully understood. However there are many relations that are understood. Theoretical examples include: pollution which can be seen as a function of population multiplied by the ratio of income over population multiplied by the ratio of pollution over income. Resource use can be seen as a function of population multiplied by the ratio of income over population multiplied by the ratio of resource in spatial distribution of population in Eastern Europe over the last several decades. Between 1950-90 its population grew by only 28%. This is because of drastic increases in pollution and resource use.

Prospects for international migration: globalization and its discontents.

The paper challenges the view that the late twentieth century is the ‘age of migration’. For developing countries, flows of out-migrants are small compared with population growth, although in developed countries the stock of immigrants increased in proportion to the total population between 1965 and 1990. Despite the importance of refugee movement, the main force for international migration is economic. Why do not more people migrate (internally and internationally) to take advantage of potential economic gains? For international migration, one deterrent is institutional barriers against uncontrolled immigration. Different interest groups stand to gain or lose from increased migration. The income-enhancing effects of unhindered international labour migration, measured jointly for sending and receiving countries and by extension globally, should be very large. Even partial liberalization of immigration to industrialized countries would serve developing countries well. In industrialized countries, however, there is concern about the effect of massive labour inflows on the ethnic, religious and cultural composition of the population and its social cohesion. In some countries, migration is leading to greater ethnic mingling; in others there is a recrudescence of nationalistic aspirations for independent statehood with ethnically homogeneous populations, or to preserve the advantages of economically successful subregions.

Sub-replacement fertility in national populations: Can it be raised?

This paper comments on the four main functions demographers perform: fact-finding, analysis, prediction, and policymaking. Successes in the first two of these are counterbalanced by weakness in predictive ability. The focus of the comments, however, is on policy. Demographers were influential in promoting efforts to lower very high fertility but are ineffectual in proposing policies that could reverse the tendency of fertility to sink well below replacement levels. The paper argues for a break from exclusive reliance on the standard measures of modern welfare states intended to raise fertility and urges exploration of radically new approaches. Two promising innovations are briefly outlined: one would give the right to vote to all citizens regardless of age, the voting right of minors being exercised by parental proxy, and another that would reform state-administered pension schemes by arranging a direct transfer of working children’s mandatory contributions to social security funds to their retired parents.

Population on the world agenda 1984: a view from Bucharest.

Thise comments and remarks were fomulated in 1974 during a panel discussion which was part of the program for the Population Tribune a nongovernmental meeting organized in parallel with the 1st UN World Population Conference at Bucharest. The panelists discussed the ways in which they expected the deliberations of a similarly conceived international conference taking place 10 years after Bucharest would differ from those of the 1974 meeting. The author prefaces his comments by clarifying his own position: population change is nnot the determinant of economic and social development. 5 major differences between the future policy debates and those at Bucharest are identified explored and critically judged. The next Conferences deliberations will be characterised by a greatly increased understanding and appreciation of what its topic is supposed to be of what the population problem really is and of what population policy is about. The author argues that the present conference did not deal with these issues in a satisfactory fashion. He maintains that there has been a failure to identify the structure of the population problem: an inconsistency between collective and individual interest. The principle to be adopted by governments is to analyze their own situation identify their problems and act according to their best interest. The principles are the same whether a country is developed or developing. A 2nd major difference will be an increased understanding and appreciation that population policies should be guided by a search for improvement and optimization. A 3rd important difference will be increased demographic sophistication of the participants to overcome the mechanistic and naive interpretation of the development-fertility link. A 4th difference is the expectation that by 1984 the economic sophistication in discussing problems of development will have been greatly increased which will facilitate constructive discussions of economic-demographic interrelations. A final change expected for 1984 would manifest itself in a calmer yet more helpful stance of the developed countries with respect to the developing world in demographic matters. Ultimately the solutions must be local rather than global.