AS JULY 11 marked the World Population Day, we got to hear more of the commonly understood reasons for the high rates of population growth and its adverse impact on the problems of underdevelopment including poverty and socio-economic conditions.

However, what is common knowledge in development economics is yet to be internalized by the policy makers so that the population growth rate is reduced appreciably. Otherwise, notwithstanding its importance, the entire effort will remain focused on the supply side of family planning programmes with little appreciation of the determinants of demand for population growth. This other prong needs to be dealt with too so as to impact the issue visibly.

No matter how hectic or intense is the activity of the population welfare wing, it is the demand for a large family size that needs to be arrested especially amongst the poor and the low-income segments comprising nothing less than 60-65 per cent of the population. Unless this demand for more and more children is reduced, the population welfare efforts will continue to be thwarted innovatively and we will be able to boast only of modest decrease in population growth rates and not significant ones.

A major determinant of demand for children is the low - or subsistence levels of incomes. At these income levels, the demand for children is high because they become income earners at a young age of 10 or 12 with little or no parental investment. So, the bigger the family size, the higher is the number of income earning members of the family. Children are thus required to provide financial security and generate a surplus even while the parents are young. This behaviour is analogous to those of the affluent parents with the only difference being the stage of the life cycle and the nature of security expected from children in the parents’ old age. Since the parents in the latter case are affluent, it is the quality of children they are more concerned about than the quantity. And because the cost of children is high, the quantity is traded off with quality if the focus is on high quality children in well-off families. Quality in this case implies schooling, education, health, personality development, and long-term income earning potential that may require a couple of decades to develop. With economic reasons driving family size decisions, the low-income and the poor tend to have more children also because of the high rates of infant mortality so as to eventually have the desired number of surviving children. Health care facilities, therefore, become a key variable in determining population growth rate. The desire for male children also compels them to have large families especially if the first few children are females. Given the above economic compulsions, there is virtually no demand to contain the family size at the low-income end. The population welfare programmes targeted at women can, at best, have limited success given the above disposition of the low-income and poor parents in general and the male heads of the family in particular who require more and more working hands within the family and soon.

Given the above economic compulsions of the poor, there is a mutual causation between population growth and poverty. While population growth certainly contributes to poverty, poverty leads to a demand for children as demonstrated by the microeconomic logic of fertility. The educated elite see the above behaviour as absolutely irrational whereas there is a poor family’s economic rationality at work that not everybody can see. Their survival and security instinct at a young age is not too drastically different from that of the educated elite at a later stage in life. Guided by economic security needs and in the absence of state social security, there is a demand for male children even in educated-affluent families whose size might also swell for the same reason. While this factor is viewed as cultural, there are strong economic reasons underpinning it. In the economic cost-benefit analysis, male children outperform the female ones in terms of net gain. Consequently, they acquire premium value and thereby social and cultural power derived from their superior economic potential. What is viewed as a decadent social and cultural value system may actually be emanating from a “sound” economic logic, however perverse it might sound. It is this economic logic that needs to be reversed if social and cultural factors have to change for the better. And, if the population growth is to be arrested.

In addition to intense population welfare effort, the levels of living of the low-income and the poor need to be raised to the extent that it becomes beneficial for them to have fewer children than more. While this brings us to the entire gamut of a national development strategy, suffice it to say that there cannot be a poverty alleviation strategy in parallel with some other strategies that are only likely to generate more poverty for alleviation by a poverty alleviation strategy. The national development strategy should strike at the roots of poverty in such a manner that as the poor are engaged in the development process, the poverty alleviation strategy becomes redundant over time. If self-employment is to be at the centre of poverty alleviation, then self-employment is a black box that needs to be studied for the entire economy. For, self-employment should not just be a way of inflating the informal sector in the urban areas. Rather, self-employment should be provided in those sectors of the economy where the bulk of the population is concentrated. That is, in rural areas through effective land reforms that give land to the tiller and unleash human initiative and enterprise. In Pakistan, 92 per cent of the area is utilized/ cultivated in farms of size less than 0.5 acres and only 54 per cent of the area is utilized/cultivated in farms bigger than 60 acres. With cultivation intensity and productivity inversely related to farm size, a case for meaningful land reform with supportive policies is strong. Those who dismiss it as inviable and impossible ought to know that development is about the art of doing the impossible as doing the possible would either maintain status quo or result in incremental change that indirectly reinforces the status quo.

As people are engaged in a growing formal agricultural economy, not only will the tide of poverty be turned but also that of rural-urban migration and a rising urban underclass. The incomes of the people should be growing in a sustainable manner in the formal economy so that their fertility behaviour may be influenced for the better. As incomes rise, the cost of children and also the opportunity costs of having children increase which have a direct impact on the demand for children. Increase in family income implies a decrease in the immediate utility of children’s contribution to family income. They are, however, still required for long-term old-age security. Consequently, with an increase in family income, parents are more inclined to invest in their long-term income generating potential through the best education possible. Since there are now increasing costs involved in child rearing as the emphasis shifts to quality, the emphasis on quantity stands replaced with quality. The demand for children is thus reduced as the probability of their survival also goes up due to better health care that financially better off parents can afford. The population growth rate is then expected to be affected favourably and significantly.

As the cost of children is inversely related to the demand for children, the cost of child rearing is further dependent on the degree of desired quality which, in turn, depends upon parental vision that is normally a function of their levels of education. Education and life aspirations undergo a sea change as families begin to graduate from the lower order basic needs to the higher order ones of self-esteem and later of self-actualization. As parents seek greater improvement in the quality of family’s life, the opportunity cost of having children goes further up thereby further depressing the demand for children. Consequently, both parents may seek a broader sphere of activity outside the household which further influences the number of children they have time for. As time becomes a scarce resource for parents seeking fulfilment of higher order needs, the demand for children is visibly depressed. And, gender of children becomes inconsequential for parents who can see far and beyond the conventional view of life. Education and employment of women, therefore, gains salience in determining population growth rates.

So, if population growth rates are to be reduced visibly in a short period of time, a combination of policies is required for the various income levels. While intense population welfare activity is required at the middle-income levels where women are attempting to gain control over their lives, the poor and the low-income levels have to be first given control of their destinies which they currently think are inextricably linked to fate.

This fatalistic view will impede the best population welfare effort for as long as the poor view it as an attempt to deprive them from about the only blessing they ever receive which is in the form of children!