34 Population Policy

During the past 70 years, governments around the world have designed and implemented population policies to address the different phases of the demographic transition, namely high mortality levels, high or low fertility levels, national and international migration flows, urbanization patterns, and the population aging crisis in some countries that have completed their demographic transition. The chapter first covers the population policy rationales and definitions, the population policy process as well as the research findings. Thereafter, the chapter turns to the population policies implementation issues, including the implementation approaches and the implementation results. The chapter relies extensively on concrete examples of population policies design and implementation in various parts of the world. To conclude, the chapter assesses the way forward for population policies and stresses their importance. It contends that is possible to intervene on demographic trends, with a reasonable level of efficiency, and within the human rights framework.

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Population Policies Framework

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Classical Foundations of Past and Present Population Policies

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Prospects for Population Policies and Interventions

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Notes

The 2017 projections prepared by the United Nations Population Division suggest a sub-Saharan African population of 4 billion people by year 2100 (Medium variant), translating into a potential quadrupling of the 2017 population of sub-Saharan Africa unless fertility would decrease much faster than currently assumed (United Nations 2017b).

The Ebola epidemic started in 2013 in West Africa, but was eradicated fairly rapidly. However, other epidemics, as yet unknown, could emerge in the future (see Whiteside and Zebryk 2017).

The commonly accepted view is that the global environment is threatened mostly because of the over-consumption of a growing population (The Royal Society 2012). However, there is no international consensus yet on the proposed remedy, either a dramatic change in the consumption patterns or a rapid mitigation of the population growth.

Canada and Australia favor merit-based immigration, whereas the United States traditionally has favored family reunification along with some skilled-based immigration.

The conclusion of this enquiry might have been different had the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ panel been asked to examine the relationship between economic growth and fertility (instead of population growth).

Pakistan’s TFR estimated at 3.6 in mid-2017 declined later than Bangladesh’s TFR estimated at 2.3 for the same date (Population Reference Bureau 2017). Since the two countries are culturally quite similar and were politically united until 1971, the contrast in their fertility transitions appears to be linked to large-scale family planning efforts that have taken place in Bangladesh but not in Pakistan.

Once again, the case of Bangladesh is a vivid illustration of the pressure on land. In 2017, the population density exceeded 1,100 inhabitants per square kilometer.

Population growth is believed to be “optimal” when it does not exceed these limits.

A sub-field of demographic studies, called the “security demographic,” examines also the linkages between young population structures and situations of civil conflict (see Cincotta et al. 2003).

As industrialization proceeds, it could be argued that the benefits of the demographic dividend might be eroded because of the rising costs of children.

Today, the resistance to antibiotics is emerging as a major public health threat.

The policy has indirectly led to female infanticide and/or female infant neglect when parents preferred to have a male child. In the same vein, the availability of techniques to determine the gender of fetuses has led to gender-selective induced abortions in some countries, e.g. India.

In Iran, the acceleration of the decline of fertility during the late 1980s had preceded by a few years the widespread distribution of family planning methods. This rapid change can be attributed to profound social and economic transformations, including the adoption of an important agrarian reform. In addition, female education levels increased dramatically and women’s attitudes to parenthood changed as well. The sense of responsibility on the part of men increased also, fostered to some extent by the religious establishment (Abbasi-Shavazi et al. 2009).

The maternal mortality ratio, i.e. the number of women who die from maternal causes per 100,000 live births, is the health indicator that shows the widest variation across the world regions.

The United States’ position in the international debate on population issues has been considerably weakened by domestic abortion politics. This has led to periodic de-funding of agencies such as UNFPA, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), and U.S. domestic family planning organizations.

The first World Bank loan, of two million U.S. dollars, was granted to Jamaica in 1970 for strengthening the delivery of contraceptives. The World Bank is currently one of the largest financiers of population and reproductive health activities for countries with low or middle incomes (World Bank 2000; May 2012).

No new major population conferences were organized to mark the tenth and 20th anniversaries of the 1994 Cairo Conference, or are planned to take place in the foreseeable future.

Later, fertility declined again in Sweden because it had to cut its public expenditures, as required by Brussels, to be admitted in the European Union.

International migrants are defined as persons living outside their countries of birth for at least 1 year. It is estimated that there were around 175 million international migrants in the world in 2000 (Massey 2003); in 2017, the estimated number had increased to 258 million (United Nations 2017a).

Unlike the United States, European countries usually do not have immigration quotas, nor do they discuss such quotas during immigration policy debates.

However, these results for Europe have been contested recently, most notably by Le Bras (2017). First, one needs to account more accurately for people who are actually active across the different broad age groups. Second, women tend to participate more in the working population, and older people tend to remain active for longer periods of time.

This is called the family planning unmet need, defined as women who do not want another pregnancy within two years, but do not use a contraceptive method (see https://www.guttmacher.org/infographic/2017/unmet-need-modern-contraception-2017, accessed on January 29, 2018.

See https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-worldwide, accessed on January 29, 2018.

Although the abortion rate per 1000 women aged 15–44 is much lower in China than in these four countries, the demographic weight of China explains its larger number of induced abortions. At the beginning of the twentieth century, China, India, and Vietnam accounted for almost all of the legal abortions in the less-developed countries (Henshaw 2003).

The TFR in all less-developed countries combined dropped from 6.1 children per woman in 1960–65 to 3.9 in 1985–90 (Sinding 2003); it was estimated at 2.6 children per woman in mid-2017 (Population Reference Bureau 2017).

Several researchers have attempted to separate analytically the effects of population policies/programs and socioeconomic conditions on population change, usually, fertility decline. Although these authors recognize the methodological difficulties in measuring such factors, they appear to conclude that there are small to moderate associations between family planning program efforts and declines in fertility, additive to the contributions of socioeconomic improvements and ideational influences (see Hernandez 1984; Mauldin 1982; Mauldin et al. 1978; Mauldin and Ross 1991; and Ross and Mauldin 1996).

However, the TFR dropped even further in the former GDR after the reunification of Germany, which might be interpreted a contrario as proof of the impact of earlier pronatalist policies.

The objective of the FP2020 initiative is to offer contraceptive services to 120,000 additional couples in 69 priority countries over the period 2012–2020; two-thirds of these countries are in sub-Saharan Africa (see http://www.familyplanning2020.org, accessed on January 29, 2018).

Some demographers disagree with this policy recommendation and argue that major improvements in education attainment should, by themselves, help mitigate the impact of population aging (see Lutz 2014). In this author’s opinion, such a position is not yet supported by strong evidence and appears to be over-optimistic.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA John F. May
  1. John F. May