Economic science and population theory

Abstract

Abstract The object of this paper is to comment upon the role that the population factor has played in theories of economic change and, more particularly, upon the progress that has been made by economists toward the construction of integrated theories of economic development and demographic change. In the twentieth century the two main sources of renewed interest in population among economists were, first of all, the great depression of the thirties together with aspects of the work of J. M. Keynes and A. H. Hansen on mature economies (the ‘stagnation thesis’) and, secondly, the economic problems of underdeveloped countries. The Hansen stagnation thesis and variants of it are essentially ‘unidirectional’ models of demographic influence upon economic variables in mature economies. An economic-demographic model for an economically mature country that represents an attempt to go beyond unidirectional relationships to an examination of mutual interaction between economic and demographic variables is the Orcu...