Population control policies and fertility convergence

Tiloka de Silva and Silvana Tenreyro

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: The rapid population growth in developing countries in the middle of the 20th century led to fears of a population explosion and motivated the inception of what effectively became a global population-control program. The initiative, propelled in its beginnings by intellectual elites in the United States, Sweden, and some developing countries, mobilized resources to enact policies aimed at reducing fertility by widening contraception provision and changing family-size norms. In the following five decades, fertility rates fell dramatically, with a majority of countries converging to a fertility rate just above two children per woman, despite large cross-country differences in economic variables such as GDP per capita, education levels, urbanization, and female labour force participation. The fast decline in fertility rates in developing economies stands in sharp contrast with the gradual decline experienced earlier by more mature economies. In this paper, we argue that population-control policies are likely to have played a central role in the global decline in fertility rates in recent decades and can explain some patterns of that fertility decline that are not well accounted for by other socioeconomic factors

JEL-codes: J11 J13 J18 O15 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-09-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-gro and nep-his
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Published in Journal of Economic Perspectives, 1, September, 2017, 31(4), pp. 205-228. ISSN: 0895-3309

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Related works:
Journal Article: Population Control Policies and Fertility Convergence (2017)
Working Paper: Population Control Policies and Fertility Convergence (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:86623

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