Population and Poverty: Are Smaller Families a Route to Prosperity?

For the past seven decades, high fertility and poverty have been strongly correlated, and the world’s poorest countries also have the highest fertility and population growth rates. To some extent, this is due to the fact that poverty and its determinants (subsistence agriculture, low levels of education, subordinate position of women) also tend to perpetuate high fertility.

But there is also a causal link in the opposite direction, with lower fertility leading to less poverty. True, lower birth rates, a major component of population growth, do not, by themselves, guarantee greater prosperity. But they do make economic gains more feasible.

Family planning allows women to delay childbearing so they can complete their education, participate in the labour force while acquiring skills and experience. Improving the health, education and prospects of women and adolescent girls acts as an economic stimulus for countries, and has strong intergeneration benefits.

Longer intervals between births also significantly improve child and maternal health, generating benefits over children’s entire life course. Having fewer, healthier children can reduce the economic burden on poor families and allow them to invest more in each child’s care and schooling, helping to break the cycle of poverty.

Even over shorter time intervals, in the order of 2-5 years, it has been shown that smaller households, with fewer dependent members, experience higher upward economic mobility and rise out of temporary poverty spells more quickly than larger households with more dependent members.

In a more immediate way, lower fertility changes the proportion of economically active versus inactive family household members, so that approximately the same income has to be divided with fewer dependent household members. Although this effect is somewhat mechanical, it has been shown to have a major impact on poverty rates, when defined in conventional terms of per capita income or consumption.

At the aggregate level, lower population growth may reduce the pressure on social infrastructure and the need for social investments. Very high fertility rates are characteristic of the least developed countries, those countries that are least able to invest in health and education. High population growth contributes to a vicious cycle of poverty, illiteracy, poor health and high mortality.

Over the longer term, smaller families can change the age structures of countries. As fertility begins to decline, so too does the number of dependents relative to workers. When the working population is relatively large and policies foster job creation, countries can build human and physical capital. The greater number of people in the work force compared to the number of dependents allows for greater saving and investment. However, economists caution that these benefits are not automatic and that they depend on appropriate institutional environments.

In addition, rapid population growth contributes to an increase of inequality. This is because an abundant supply of labour tends to lower the price of labour with respect to capital and land. Increasing inequality nearly always implies greater poverty as well.

The ability to plan how many children to have and when to have them is a recognized human right. However, universal access to contraceptives is not yet a reality — especially among the poorest. Worldwide, 215 million women would like to delay or prevent pregnancy, but are not using effective contraception. Simply meeting this ‘unmet need’ for contraception would go a long way toward lowering fertility.

Demand for family planning is expected to soar in the next 15 years as millions of young people become sexually active and smaller families become the norm in many countries. But funding for family planning is only a fraction of what is needed.

As most developing countries now recognize, committed and focused policies and programmes are urgently needed to moderate population growth as quickly as possible, thus enhancing economic growth and easing demands on social services. 

Get the Facts

• Some 215 million women who would like to delay childbearing still have no access to contraception. Many of them live in the poorest countries, where governments are having trouble building schools and health systems for their rapidly growing populations.
• Four in 10 of the 186 million pregnancies that occur in developing countries each year are unintended, meaning that they were unwanted or were not wanted at the time. Women who lack access to effective contraception account for 82 per cent of all unintended pregnancies.
• It has been estimated that in some middle income countries like Honduras and Colombia the effect on poverty of avoiding all unwanted births would be of the same magnitude as the conditional transfer programs that the governments of those countries are using as their main policy instrument for combating poverty.
• In 56 developing countries, the poorest fifth of women still average six births, compared to 3.2 in the wealthiest quintile.
• The benefits of fully meeting the need for both family planning and maternal and newborn health services in developing countries would be dramatic. Roughly doubling the current global investments in family planning and pregnancy-related care, from $11.8 billion to $24.6 billion, would reduce:
  – maternal deaths by more than two thirds, from 356,000 to 105,000;
  – newborn deaths by more than half, from 3.2 million to 1.5 million;
  – unintended pregnancies by more than two-thirds, from 75 million to 22 million;
  – unsafe abortions by almost three quarters, from 20 million to 5.5 million; and
  – deaths from unsafe abortion by more than four-fifths, from 46,000 to 8,000.
• Studies attribute about one-quarter of the ‘miracle growth’ in East Asia after 1960 and one-third of the increase in per capita income to a demographic ‘bonus’: a larger percentage of workers compared to dependents, resulting from fertility declines. In many countries of Africa, where fertility remains high, the dependency ratio has not yet begun to decline.
• Brazilian economists have demonstrated that had fertility in Brazil not diminished during the 1946-1996 period, economic growth would have needed to be 0.4 % per year higher in order to achieve the same poverty reduction that the country experienced during these years.
• Although most of the least developed countries have policies to lower fertility, contraceptive prevalence remains low in countries with high fertility, most of which are located in sub-Saharan Africa. In much of this region, social norms still favour large families
•  Reproductive health issues, most of them related to pregnancy and childbirth, result in 250 million years of productive life lost each year and reduce the productivity of women by 20 per cent.