Book Description

This report provides information on world population growth; its impact on efforts to combat poverty and improve standards of living; its effects on the availability of food and other natural resources; and its policy implications for governments and the international community. The study's main focus is on the relationship between population growth and economic development - and on government policies required to bring about a reduction in fertility. Its central conclusion is that high rates of population growth and the massive poverty which burdens most of the developing world, despite remarkable economic growth in the aggregate, are mutually reinforcing, resulting in a vicious circle which can be broken only by a direct and simultaneous attack on both fronts. The problem is how to mount such an attack effectively, and to do so in time to forestall the most serious consequences implict in the data this report contains. That question is the object of a series of interrelated studies, of which this is one, that are being carried out by the World Bank and associated institutions in an effort to clarify the options available to policy-makers and to stimulate necessary additional research on the part of others.