Economics and population growth: The dismal science

Posted: September 29, 2011 - 11:28pm  |  Updated: September 29, 2011 - 11:32pm
Ken Zapp
Ken Zapp

Economics may be dismal for many reasons, but its original claim to be the dismal science came from the following sequence of events economists observed in the late 18th Century.

When the economy prospered, people gave birth to more children. The resultant population growth then outpaced the expansion of the economy, standards of living crashed and people starved. After the population contraction, per capita income began to expand, as did the economy.

Today we face two contrasting interactions between population and economic well being: insufficient workers in our state of Georgia and rapid population growth in the third world.

Earlier this year, our state passed a law that feels threatening for legal and non-legal immigrants, many of whom worked in agriculture. Farmers had warned their representatives that passage of this law would eliminate a labor supply on which they depended to harvest their crops.

Whenever economics and politics collide, the former usually loses.

Labor is a key input in the production of all goods and services.

When we eliminate a source of labor (for whatever reason), the cost of producing the output will increase. Would unemployed Georgians fill this labor shortage for farms? Only if the wages are significantly increased.

Result: the cost of our locally grown food will increase.

Globally we have a different trend: the number of humans continues to grow. Currently there are about 6.99 billion of us on the planet. This is expected to grow to 9.3 billion by the middle of the century.

Much of the growth will come from high fertility countries, listed in order of their populations: Pakistan, Nigeria, The Philippines, Ethiopia, Congo, Tanzania, Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ghana, Yemen, Mozambique, and Madagascar.

The countries of sub-Saharan Africa will have the fastest growth. Their current population of 1.2 billion people is expected to more than triple to 4.2 billion by the end of the century.

This projected growth of populations assumes that current family planning programs will be effective enough to reduce existing fertility rates.

A fertility rate is the number of children per woman in the society. Given the extension of life expectancies, 1.9 children per woman is needed to maintain a constant population. If family planning programs are somehow reduced or fail to achieve their goals, fertility rates will not decline and populations in the high fertility countries will grow even faster.

What impact does this population growth in developing countries have on their economies?The positive impact is that labor is cheap for producers.

However, few of these economies are growing fast enough to improve average standards of living, best measured by real GDP per capita. In other words, despite all international efforts to support economic development in these countries, their people are getting poorer.

We now know too well that poor people can pose a threat to political and social stability everywhere.

While we may cheer when they overthrow a dictator we dislike, we will face new challenges internationally when the government overthrown is our friend.

What does all this mean to an economist?

• At home, we need more, not fewer workers in several industries. Unless we drop the current fear of immigrants and benefit from their labor, our economy will suffer in the future.

• Abroad, our aid dollars may be best spent on family planning programs. Any attempt to reduce funding for these programs will prove extremely costly for us in the future.

Kenneth Zapp is a professor emeritus at Metropolitan State University who lives on Tybee Island. He can be contacted at

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