FORGET POPULATION GROWTH, GROW THE ECONOMY

Last week the Financial Times reported on a study, which showed that countries where fertility rates were high had low savings rate, which put a cap on their economic growth potential.

The correlation they suggested may have come about because with fewer children, parents spend less at home and are incentivised to save more towards their retirement because they cannot count on their children to look after them in their old age.

They gave the example of China, which pushed the one child policy since the 1970s and Kenya, which has a higher fertility rate. In China’s case the saving to GDP ratio was 210 percent versus the comparable number in Kenya of 33 percent.

Population control advocates should be slow to jump on this new finding because even the Financial Times was careful to add that there was little evidence to suggest that the correlation equals causation.

The correlation however, has important implications for development.

“The unfortunate reality is that countries with high fertility rates have the lowest share of bank accounts, the highest real interest rates and the lowest investment rates, so it is particularly hard for them to begin the development process,” The Financial Times said.

It is a simple mathematical logic, too many people plus few resourceequal trouble.

Using the same equation you can either control population numbers or increase the resources that support the growing population.

The history of populations show that country’s which have brought their population growth “under control” have done so by increasing the society’s resources first and the population growth has tapered off as a consequence.

Its kind of counter intuitive. One would think that richer societies would have a higher incentive to produce, but no. In fact in some instances population has so slowed like in much of western Europe, that some governments are now paying their citizens to have more babies, with little to no success.

It make sense. The best contraceptive is abstinence. No sex, no babies. If a government is doing its job facilitating economic growth and distributing the benefits of that growth equitably, certain things begin to happen that slow population growth.

For starters you have fewer infants dying during child birth or before they reach the age of five. So the need to play the numbers game – “Lets get many babies so that if some die we still have some left over”, falls by the way side.

Secondly more and more children go to school, especially girls, delaying their first pregnancies, which were coming earlier.

And then with a better educated population you have more men and women gainfully employed, which invariably reduces the instances for sex.

And as more people work, gainfully employed come more sources of recreation appear, which again reduces the instances of sex.

And finally, maybe, with a better educated population the adoption of contraception and other birth control methods gains acceptance much more easily, putting one more nail in the coffin of population growth.

The logic is hard to refute.

In Uganda for example the fertility rate of women has fallen from seven children per woman in 1991 to 5.8 in the last census in 2014. Most of the drop in fertility rate was found in urban centers, where services are concentrated.

Using household size as a proxy for fertility the theory seems to hold up. Kampala with total urbanisation has an average household size of 3.5, this compared with Kotido with an urbanization of 7.7 percent and a household size of 6.5.

Looking further afield. In Finland, reportedly the best place to be a woman, the urbanization rate is 85.33 percent and the fertility rate is 1.65.

It should not come as surprise that fertility rates remain stubbornly high, when we have an urbanization rate of only 21 percent.

So it is obvious, any discussion of population growth without tackling economic growth and the equitable distribution of that is a joke...

That have been said is the population a problem in Uganda? The population control people will whip out the numbers. 

We have a growth rate of three percent. So what? What that means is that at the current rate the population will double every 24 years. Ahuh? So we will 80 million in 2042 and 160 million in 2066 and in 2090, 320 million. A disaster!

Or is it?

England which is the same size as Uganda, give or take a few square kilometers has a population 55m compared to Uganda’s 40m. How come some people want to make it as if our population situation is a crisis and yet we hear nothing about England’s population crisis?

And I am willing to bet we have more natural resources in our little finger than all of the UK combined.

The telling number is that the economic output of England is $552b compared to Uganda’s $30b. That is why England does not have a population problem.