Demographic change

Question 1

Factors influencing populations in developing countries

Answer 1

• Urbanisation
• Education
• Changing roles of women
• Availability of contraception
• Improving healthcare and social services
• Effects of structural adjustment programmes on access to and cost of education and health
• Fall in the production value of children

Question 2

Thomas Malthus

Answer 2

• Population will grow faster than the food supply.

- Wars over food/ resources may end society.

Question 3

Neo-Malthusians

Answer 3

• Believe population growth is the reason developing countries are poor.
• Aid should control population growth.
• Where we don’t control population growth, we are seeing ‘New Barbarism’

Question 4

What do neo-malthusians believe are good ways to control population?

Answer 4

• Contraception (most western countries)
• Abortion (most secular countries)
• Sterilization (extreme cases only)
• Financial incentives to limit family sizes (eg. China)

Question 5

Boserup’s theory

Answer 5

• When the population is reaching the point when the food supply is reaching exhaustion, Boserup says that you just have to upgrade the productivity of the food supply.
• With more mouths to feed, people put more labour and more intense effort into feeding themselves, and finding ways to get more food production out of the land.
• Eg. Intensive farming- add extra manure, water and fertiliser.

Question 6

Dependency theory

Answer 6

• Adamson- Poverty and lack of development are not consequences of high population growth, they are causes.
• He suggests this is a direction of causality issue. Poor people have more children to support them, rather than more children making you poor.