Suchergebnisse

The debate on the relationship between population growth and economic growth has been enduring and varies across countries. While the first theory on population and economic growth states that population growth stimulates economic growth, the second theory views population growth as a factor that adversely affects economic growth. The third school of thought posits that population growth is a neutral factor in economic growth, and is determined outside standard growth models. Given this situation, there was a need to establish the relationship between economic growth and population growth in Tanzania. The study employed the Vector Auto-regression (VAR) estimation technique, and used annual time series data from 1971 to 2017. The results indicate that economic shocks due to population growth are positive and negative. This could be attributed to unstable expenditure on healthcare by the government in the improvement of child survival through various government programmes. The study concludes that, in Tanzania, population growth promotes economic growth and, subsequently, economic development. The study recommends that the government should ensure that the economy grows at a higher rate than population growth. This will ensure that the increasing demand for services arising from population growth is met. Having a large, healthier, and better-educated workforce will only bear economic fruit if the extra workers can find jobs.

Health is a direct source of human welfare and also an instrument for raising income levels. The authors discuss a number of mechanisms through which health can affect income, focusing on worker productivity, children's education, savings and investment, and demographic structure. As well as the impact of current illness, health may have large effects on prospective life spans and life cycle behavior. Studies suggest there may be a large effect of health and nutrition in uteri, and in the first few years of life, on physical and cognitive development and economic success as an adult. Macroeconomic evidence for an effect on growth is mixed, with evidence of a large effect in some studies. However, there is a possibility that gains from health may be outweighed by the effect of increased survival on population growth, until a fertility transition occurs. The low cost of some health interventions that have large-scale effects on population health makes health investments a promising policy tool for growth in developing countries. In addition, higher priority could be given to tackling widespread 'neglected' diseases that is, diseases with low mortality burdens that are not priorities from a pure health perspective, but that do have substantial effects on productivity.

Population figures based on surveys conducted in 1957 and 1967 are presented for the Gusii community of "Nyansongo" in southwestern Kenya. The figures suggest a considerable increase in population, possibly even greater than that for Kenya as a whole, which has one of the highest rates of natural increase in Africa. The social consequences of such an increase are referred to, and emphasis is given to the need for ethnographic restudy of communities.

This paper applies the interest-group theory of government to explain population growth. The main argument is that countries whose populations are more ethnically heterogeneous will tend to have higher fertility rates because there are more interest groups which compete for control of the political process of wealth redistribution. The theoretical model is supported by empirical evidence using data on 130 countries for 1980.