Question

1. Is rapid population growth threatening the economic progress of developing countries? Do large families make economic sense in an environmental of wide spread poverty and financial insecurity?

Answer 1

Rapid population growth that surpasses the growth rate of capital stock and the rate at which natural resources and assets are replenished do significantly threaten the economic progress of developing nations. Rapid population growth in developing countries like India and China has been a longstanding socio-economic issue. The economic ability of developing nations is heavily strained with an unstable and rapid growth in population, as the proportion of sanctioned public goods and services that act as the frontline for servicing and improving the social and overall development get depleted on a per capita basis. The economic progress of nations stems from empowering the population that makeup the labour force with skills to make them more productive and enable them to enhance their social and financial situation. As the population grows rapidly, developing nations, that are already battling numerous other socio-economic and political issues, feel the obligation to accommodate the population growth by undertaking a series of expansionary policy initiatives to create a solid base for human resource development, this can potentially increase the economies debt ratios further straining the overal economic health of the nation.

Large families do not make economic sense in an environment where wide-spread poverty and financial insecurity are prevelant. Having large families leads to an iteratively depriciating proportion of per capita resource allocation. With families that share similar characteristics as a quintessential nuclear family, the allocation of existing resources is less disperesed, which means smaller families would move towards the direction of thriving with existisng resources as there would be lesser mouths to feed and concentration of financial resources for education, food, and clothes can be employed more efficiently with better returns. The issue of rapid population growth and larger families trickles down to the ability of economy or a family to sustain themselves with a given stock of resources. So to sum it up, rapid population growth coupled with financial instability in any country is a bad economic indicator.