Title:	World Population Policies
Authors:	John F. May
Keywords:	World Population
Issue Date:	2012
Publisher:	Springer
Description:	While concern about the balance between population growth and available resources has been around since the time of the Rev. Thomas Malthus more than 200 years ago, public policies to infl uence population variables have a much more recent provenance. Malthus despaired, of course, that unless the increase in human numbers could be brought under control, food production would inevitably fall further and further behind population growth with the result being ever-increasing hunger and poverty for a great majority of people. He urged the institutions of his time to take action to slow down the growth of human numbers, although the means for doing so were few and the response was minimal. Modern population policies, at least at a national level, had to wait 150 years, until the early 1950s when, as a result of the fi rst round of post-World War II censuses, UN demographers suddenly came to realize that populations were growing at unprecedented rates, particularly in Asia. Concern began to spread about an impending “population explosion” and, echoing Malthus’s earlier alarms, international leaders began calling for action to stem this rapid growth. The year 1952 might be identifi ed as the beginning of an international population “movement” that brought about increasingly collective action among nations over the next 40 years. In 1952 two important international institutions were born – the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the Population Council – that arguably led the drive for collective global action over the next 20 years; and India announced the world’s fi rst national population policy – a commitment to reduce birth rates through a national family planning effort. It would be nice to report that the movement that sprang from these early seeds fl ourished and grew with uniform speed and impact throughout the world, but as John May eloquently demonstrates in this volume, that was hardly the case. Through the fi rst 20 years after 1952, global recognition of a population problem grew rather slowly and only a few nations, nearly all of them in Asia, decided to take action to slow down demographic growth. Among those that began to take action in the 1960s were India’s South Asian neighbors, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, followed soon thereafter by Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea, Indonesia and Thailand. By the late 1960s, many of the larger Asian nations had adopted population policies, nearly all of them consisting principally of family planning service programs. While the programs in East and Southeast Asia for the most part thrived and were quite successful in bringing birth rates down, those that had started a decade or so earlier in India and Pakistan did not. The South Asian programs achieved very disappointing results and, perhaps because they were the earliest and the most closely studied, gave rise to increasing pessimism in many circles about how effective family planning programs by themselves could be in reducing fertility. Many academic demographers, long skeptical about how enthusiastically individual couples would respond to voluntary family planning programs, saw in the disappointing South Asian results confi rmation that much more was needed to stimulate demand for smaller families. Thus, calls began for measures “beyond family planning” – actions to stimulate the desire for smaller families or to directly reward those who achieved them. These ranged from relatively indirect parallel measures such as improving girls’ access to education and reducing under-fi ve mortality rates, to more active interventions such as monetary incentives to use contraceptives or to limit births, to more draconian actions including rationing access to housing based on small family size or paying people to undergo sterilization. Policymakers in India had become so frustrated by the failure of voluntary family planning efforts that they turned increasingly to such solutions, culminating in the coercive sterilization campaigns during the so-called Emergency of 1975–1977. Chinese authorities, with their “One-Child Policy”, resorted to similarly coercive policies shortly thereafter.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/51169
ISBN:	978-94-007-2837-0
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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