A Long-Range View of World Population Growth

John D. Durand
Additional contact information
John D. Durand: Graduate Group in Demography at the University of Pennsylvania

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1967, vol. 369, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Mankind is undergoing an extraordinary ex pansion of numbers, unparalleled in history, which began in the eighteenth century and which has gathered increasing momentum since the beginning of the present century. The increase of the earth's human population during the last two hundred years has been three times greater than the cumulated growth during all the previous millennia of man's existence on the planet, and it appears likely that a still greater increase may be in store for the future, before a position of numerical stability is reached. The speeding up of population growth has been brought about by a great improvement in the conditions of mortality, which has enhanced the biological power of multiplication of the species. This has been partly offset in the economically more developed countries by restraint of reproduction, but reproduction rates remain undiminished in most of the less developed countries. The latter countries contain the major share of world population and are receiving an even larger share of the current increase resulting from the excess of births over deaths throughout the world. The crux of the world population problem is in the association of persistent poverty and technological retardation with unremitting rapid growth of numbers in the less developed countries.

Date: 1967
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/000271626736900101 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:369:y:1967:i:1:p:1-8

DOI: 10.1177/000271626736900101

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().