Population Growth and Human Welfare

A Digital History of Anglophone Demography and Global Population Control, 1915–1984

Summary Cities, contributing more than 75% of global carbon emissions, are at the heart of climate change mitigation. Given cities' heterogeneity, they need specific low-carbon roadmaps instead of one-size-fits-all approaches. Here, we present the most detailed and up-to-date accounts of CO2 emissions for 294 cities in China and examine the extent to which their economic growth was decoupled from emissions. Results show that from 2005 to 2015, only 11% of cities exhibited strong decoupling, whereas 65.6% showed weak decoupling, and 23.4% showed no decoupling. We attribute the economic-emission decoupling in cities to several socioeconomic factors (i.e., structure and size of the economy, emission intensity, and population size) and find that the decline in emission intensity via improvement in production and carbon efficiency (e.g., decarbonizing the energy mix via building a renewable energy system) is the most important one. The experience and status quo of carbon emissions and emission-GDP (gross domestic product) decoupling in Chinese cities may have implications for other developing economies to design low-carbon development pathways.

In late 2011, the world’s population surpassed the 7 billion mark and is currently growing by an additional 82 million persons every year (United Nations, 2013a). By 2050, the world’s population is likely to reach an unprecedented size between 8.3 billion and 10.9 billion people. Most of the future population growth will occur in developing countries, particularly in least developed countries. Presently, many developing countries still have population growth rates that, if sustained, would undermine their development and put pressure on future generations. Consequently, stabilizing population growth is a goal in many of these countries that must be achieved in order to preserve the options for the future and ensure sustainable development. In contrast, developed countries and some middle income countries are experiencing belowreplacement fertility levels (less than 2.1 children per woman), declining population growth rates, and in some cases, declining population size. These countries are facing shrinking working-age populations, rapid population ageing and associated implications for renewability of the labour force and sustainability of social security and health care systems.

first birth control clinic in the United States was opened by Margaret Sanger in 1916. It was closed almost immediately and Mrs. Sanger arrested. legal battle went on for the next seven years, and in 1923 the clinic was reopened. In 1936 the Comstock Laws were re-interpreted by the courts to permit physicians to prescribe birth control for patients and to disseminate information regarding it through the mails. Baltimore was one of the first large cities to follow Margaret Sanger. A clinic called The Bureau for Contraceptive Advice was founded in 1927 by a committee of Johns Hopkins physicians under the direction of Dr. Bessie Moses. Under her brilliant and dedicated leadership, the association grew steadily. There were no dramatic developments, however, in the outreach program until 1958. Community apathy, restrictive referral policies by both Public Health and Welfare, and the lack of acceptable methods were factors preventing the association from reaching in any significant numbers the families most in need of its services. A national breakthrough in publicity, with articles on birth control and population growth appearing in an increasing number of magazines and publications, occurred in the late 1950's. impact was soon felt in Baltimore. Concerned individuals began to question public policy on birth control. Two sessions of the Grand Jury included specific recommendations for the referral of welfare clients to Planned Parenthood. Governor's Commission to Study the Problems of Illegitimacy also considered the birth control approach to the problem, and their concern resulted in a majority recommendation for referral in their final report. real turning point for Maryland came in the fall of 1962 when the State Board of Welfare adopted an affirmative policy of referral for married clients to family planning services. This was due largely to the efforts of the Planned Parenthood Association's Clergymen's Board. Long concerned with restrictive public policy on birth control in the community, they made the first direct approach to the Board of Welfare in the spring of 1961. Meetings were held with the directors of the two tax-supported hospitals, the directors of City and State Departments of Welfare, and with representatives of the Roman Catholic Church. These groups were presented with the strong convictions of a representative delegation of Protestant and Jewish clergymen who strongly advocated making birth control services available for the less privileged families in the community. Expressing their respect for the Roman Catholic position on this issue, they emphasized their conviction that in a pluralistic society the beliefs of one religious group should not be imposed on a majority. Prior to 1962, Planned Parenthood's

COMMENTS ON A PAPER BY JOHN B. GRAHAM, "THE RELATION OF GENETICS TO CONTROL OF HUMAN FERTILITY"* DUDLEY KIRKf Perhaps my role as the only social scientist participating in a population genetics meeting accounts for my invitation from Dwight Ingle to comment on Dr. Graham's paper. As Graham freely admits, his paper has little to do with genetics and is in fact an appeal for more scientific and political effort on population limitation by his biomedical colleagues. I do not fault him for this general objective; the world population problem certainly needs more scientific study and constructive action than it now receives. Nor do I disagree with Dr. Graham's major points that rapid population growth may and often does adversely affect nutrition, social welfare, economic development, and the quality of life. My disagreement with Graham lies in his interpretation of facts, his draconian conclusions, and his recommendation that human genetics be curtailed as a "baroque" science. Graham properly accuses demographers like myself of decrying the hysteria of biologists about population growth. Demographers and many other social scientists have viewed with dismay the naive and simplistic statements of biologists in this field. It is not that demographers do not comprehend the gravity of the problem—indeed it has been their major preoccupation in the last twenty years. But, with the fanaticism of the newly converted, biologists have been quite prepared to indulge in exaggeration in their eagerness to put an apocalyptic vision before the public. I do not for a moment regard Graham as guilty of deliberate mis- * Adapted from remarks presented at the Panel on Population Genetics, Conference on Genetic Disease Control, Washington, D.C., December 8-5, 1970 [I]. t Morrison Professor of Population Studies, Food Research Institute, Stanford University , Stanford, California 94305. 284 I Dudley Kirk · Control of Human Fertility representation. He is a man of great integrity and compassion. But in this paper he has been swept along in the full cry of biologists' alarm about world population growth. One could not question all of Graham's paper without writing a longer one. I will rather point to two common sources of disagreement between social scientists and biologists and then illustrate from his first three charts. 1. The numbers game.—Biologists are prone, as indeed demographers were some years ago, to point to inevitable Malthusian disaster by extrapolating present rates of population growth to "standing room only." But long-term extrapolations predicting an anthill density of population in the United States and in the world are merely arithmetic exercises with little relevance to reality. There are many socioeconomic trends that, if continued, will bring disaster long before population pressure will. To take only a single such trend among hundreds, the rate of murders in the United States is said to be increasing at 7 percent per year. If this is true and continues very long, the population problem will have been more than solved before we are well into the next century. Any constant geometric rate of growth, no matter how large or small, ultimately leads to astronomical absurdities. There are checks and balances in the social system that are today operating to reduce rates of population growth just as they operated to raise the birth rate in the United States after the depression of the 1930s. Paralleling the possibility of 300,000,000 Americans in the year 2000 at present rates of population growth is a very different result from another extrapolation. If the rates of fertility decline from 1960 to 1968 (mostly before the present brouhaha about zero population growth) are extrapolated, couples will on the average have only half a child by the end of the century.1 Of course I do not expect this to happen; it merely illustrates the fact that strong forces to slow our population growth were already well under way in the 1960s. In any case, the United States' population is currently running along the lowest of four series of forecasts made by the United States Census Bureau as recently as 1969. This lowest series yields a population of 266,000,000 by the year 2000, not the 300,000,000 often cited. Our problem in the...

Social Security Priorities and Patterns: A Global Perspective

California’s water system has immense seasonal, annual, and geographic variability in hydrology and water demands and tremendous historical growth in population and dynamism in economic structure. Although California’s situation would normally make it highly vulnerable to water shortages and floods, California has adapted effectively. An extensive set of semi-autonomous local, regional, and statewide water management institutions supports extensive and diverse water management infrastructure and operations. These diverse facilities and institutions are coordinated by an extensive web of regulations, water rights, contracts, and incentives, despite continuing challenges. The resulting institutional and physical system has always suffered from the semi-aridity and variability of California’s climate, and is continuously challenged by long-term growth in population and shifts in economic structure and social objectives. However, the political decentralisation of the system has brought steady local innovation, with larger episodic regional and statewide innovations accompanying the additional attention and focus brought by extreme events. The high variability of California’s climate also provides frequent political motivation for large- and small-scale innovations in water management. The result is a form of far-sighted incrementalism, driven by continuing problems and providing an unusual degree of water security for most of the state, though not all.

Economic growth is typically measured in per capita terms.A long tradition in philosophy, however, suggests that social welfare may depend on the number of people as well.To illustrate how much this matters quantitatively, we decompose social welfare growth-measured in consumption-equivalent (CE) units -into contributions from rising population and rising per capita consumption.Because of diminishing marginal utility from consumption, population growth is scaled up by a value-of-life factor that empirically averages nearly 3 across countries since 1960.Population increases are therefore a major contributor to growth if one takes a total rather than per capita view.CE welfare growth around the world averages more than 6% per year since 1960 as opposed to 2% per year for consumption growth.Countries such as Mexico and South Africa rise sharply in the growth rankings, whereas China, Germany, and Japan plummet.These results are robust to incorporating richer individual preferences and endogenous fertility using time-use data from the U.

China is in the process of industrialization with a large amount of the labor force moving from the agricultural sector to industrial sectors. An expansion of the pay-as-you-go social security benefits current urban retirees, and may solve the social security payment problem faced by many state enterprises. Also, although facing a declining population growth rate, China may not have a social security crisis under a pay-as-you-go social security just covering the wage earners, as many industrialized countries face. However, the expansion of the pay-as-you-go social security may have an adverse effect on capital accumulation in the long run, hurting the rural old, and either benefiting or hurting the wage earners in urban areas before the completion of industrialization, and is likely to reduce wage earners' welfare after industrialization. Introduction As economic reforms in other areas proceed in China, social security reform has become urgent. China has a pay-as-you-go social security which covers only a small portion of the population. The social security reform can go different directions: expanding the existing to cover more people, or privatizing the present by establishing accounts, or a combination of the two. This paper analyzes the effect of an expansion of the current pay-as-you-go on the Chinese economy. Many countries in the world provide social security to their residents. Most social security systems are pay-as-you-go in nature, i.e., government collects taxes from the working generation to finance the benefits to the retired generation. This is also called an unfunded system because the benefit received and the taxes paid by an may not be the same. Under this population growth will benefit each generation since there will be more young people supporting the retirees. Problems arise when the population growth rate begins to decline, i.e., each generation has to pay more and more to keep the parent generation as happy as their grandparent generation. As capital markets become well-developed, it is also possible for a person to provide old-age security for him- or herself. When working, each deposits a portion of his or her salaries into a fund. Over time the fund would accumulate interest, and on retirement, each receives the principal and accrued interest as old-age security benefits. This form of old-age security can be called individual security, and it is a fully-funded because individuals receive exactly what they paid in terms of the present value. Recent research on Chinese social security reforms have identified two major problems China's new social security must solve. One is to reduce the social security burden of the state enterprises, and the second is to avoid a social security crisis due to the decrease in the population growth rate (Zhou and Wang, 1994; and the World Bank, 1997). To solve these problems, a mixed social security which combines a social account (an account through which the government collects social security contributions from the young and pays social security benefits to the old) and an account (a mandatory savings account through which an saves when young and withdraw savings and interest when old) has been recommended. On one hand, this proposed is an expansion of the current pay-as-you-go social security since more workers are covered; on the other hand, the is a partial privatization of the existing since each worker has his or her own mandatory saving account. The size of the social account and the account is essential to determine the nature of the social security system. At present, the social account is the major part. Thus, the social security is largely pay-as-you-go in nature. This paper argues that a pay-as-you-go social security can easily solve the social security payment problem in the state enterprises. …

Context Management of wild horses (Equus caballus) on public lands in the western United States by gathering and removing surplus animals has historically failed to keep up with annual population growth. Research has yielded several effective contraceptive agents but these agents have not been widely applied, especially on difficult-to-access horses occupying expansive ranges. Aims This study examined wild horse population growth reduction associated with controlled-release PZP-22 immunocontraceptive vaccine treatments in two challenging herd management areas (HMA) in the western United States. Methods Populations of wild horse herds at Cedar Mountain HMA, Utah (CM), and Sand Wash Basin HMA, Colorado (SWB), USA, were primed with PZP-22 in gathers conducted in 2008 and 2012 (CM only) and boosted with PZP-22 or native PZP administered by dart (SWB in 2010) or by hand (CM in 2012). The two herds were intensively observed between 2008 and 2015. Population size, mortality, reproductive rates and growth rates were calculated from exhaustive inventories of known individuals. Key results Adult and foal mortality were low at both sites. Consequently, both reproductive rates and population growth rates were strongly predicted by a fertility control index, the product of proportion of mares treated and vaccine efficacy. Following the 2012 CM gather, at which 69% of the mares present were treated, only 20% of mares in the herd foaled, and population growth rate decreased by 74% relative to baseline levels, emphasising the importance of treating a large majority of mares. Conclusions Contraception can significantly reduce rates of population growth in wild horse herds that occupy large areas and are challenging to access. Multiple-year efforts and recruitment of new mares into the treatment population beyond the initial application are needed to achieve a biologically significant impact. Implications The strong quantitative relationship between proportion of mares treated and vaccine efficacy and population growth rates should allow managers to better forecast the effort and number of removals (if any) needed to cost-effectively regulate wild horse population numbers and protect the range ecosystem.

Population growth and climate change: A dynamic integrated climate-economy-demography model

Do Municipal Governments Need More Tax Powers? A Background Paper on Municipal Finance in Alberta

Iran, one of the larger countries of the Middle East, has been considered historically a less-developed country. In recent years, however, Iran appears to have been achieving tremendous economic progress. In 1972, Iran's gross national product increased to 1,186X4 billion rials (from 412 9 billion rials in 1964); the average annual real rate of growth of G.N.P. (since 1965) has been a phenomenal 10 * 4 per cent; and per capita G.N.P., despite Iran's considerable population growth, has expanded at a real rate of 7 2 per cent. At the same time, Iran has experienced high levels of oil exports which, combined with increasing oil price, have provided a substantial amount of revenue. There is no doubt that the proportion of total revenue attributable to petroleum-related factors is responsible for a significant share of Iran's increasing national income and high rate of growth. In this paper, the question is asked whether the great economic strides achieved by Iran are largely the result of expanding oil revenues. In other words, has the rate of growth been directly influenced by increasing oil revenues or also indirectly-that is, have increased oil exports financed significant growth in other sectors? To analyse this issue, we will examine other characteristics of the Iranian economy, such as changes in real sectoral product, economic structure and employment, level of education, social welfare, and so on. Our purpose is to survey these factors, and to determine the extent to which Iran's growing national income is due primarily to increased oil revenues as opposed to overall economic development.'

Long-run Output, Welfare and Fertility in a Neoclassical OLG Growth Model. The Effects of Intra-generational Tax Policies - This paper examines the long-run effects of intra-generational tax policies on demographic and macroeconomic variables as well as on the lifetime welfare of the representative generation in a simple Diamond’s OLG model of growth with endogenous fertility. We show that seemingly neutral redistributive tax policies on the younger generation may be very effective as regards both economic growth and welfare. Furthermore, the wage subsidy (tax) rate may be used as a policy instrument for reducing (increasing) population growth. JEL Classification: D91, H24, J13, O41

BackgroundThis study examined the variation in city-level amenable mortality, i.e. mortality due to conditions that can be mitigated in the presence of timely and effective healthcare, in 363 Latin American cities and measured associations between amenable-mortality rates and urban metrics.MethodsWe used death records from 363 cities with populations of >100 000 people in nine Latin American countries from 2010 to 2016. We calculated sex-specific age-adjusted amenable-mortality rates per 100 000. We fitted multilevel linear models with cities nested within countries and estimated associations between amenable mortality and urban metrics, including population size and growth, fragmentation of urban development and socio-economic status.ResultsCities in Mexico, Colombia and Brazil had the highest rates of amenable mortality. Overall, >70% of the variability in amenable mortality was due to between-country heterogeneity. But for preventable amenable mortality, those for which the healthcare system can prevent new cases, most of the variability in rates occurred between cities within countries. Population size and fragmentation of urban development were associated with amenable mortality. Higher fragmentation of urban development was associated with lower amenable mortality in small cities and higher amenable mortality in large cities. Population growth and higher city-level socio-economic status were associated with lower amenable mortality.ConclusionsMost of the variability in amenable mortality in Latin American cities was due to between-county heterogeneity. However, urban metrics such as population size and growth, fragmentation of urban development and city-level socio-economic status may have a role in the distribution of amenable mortality across cities within countries.