GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT: Demographic Change

Question 1

Demographic Transition stages

Answer 1

Stage 1: high birth rate, high death rate
Stage 2: High birth rate, death rate starts to decrease
Stage 3: Low birth rate, low death rate (some developing countries are at stage 2, UK is at Stage 3)

Question 2

Factors in population growth

Answer 2

1. Education
2. Changing Role of Women
3. Contraception
4. Improving healthcare & social services
5. Fall in production value of children
6. Urbanisation
7. Effects of structural adjustment

Question 3

Neo-Malthusian view on Demographic Change in relation to development

Answer 3

• Believe population growth is the reason developing countries are poor
• Aid should control population growth
• Where we don’t see population control, we’ll see ‘New Barbarism’
• Ways to control population growth: contraception, abortion, sterilisation, financial incentives to reduce family size

Question 4

Modernisation (Boserup) View on Demographic Change in relation to development

Answer 4

• Population is reaching the point of exhaustion
• You have to upgrade the productivity of the food supply; capitalist countering Malthus, who says people will die
• Believes capitalism and people will invent their way out of the Malthusian crisis

Question 5

Dependency (Adamson) view on Demographic Chang in relation to development

Answer 5

• Poverty and lack of development are not consequences of population growth, they are causes
• Suggests this is a direction of causality issue; poor people have more children, making you poor. view the children as insurance policies. Children have economic value for poor parents