What is population and whar are its impact on the economy?

Question

give the answer in detail...

Answer 1

Population from one side is labor-force - resource for production who does production process (another are capital and land), creates technology, combines resources in enterprises, etc.

From another side population creates demand for production of goods and services - that is population is side for whom economy produces.

Answer 2

In sociology and biology a population is the collection of people or organisms of a particular species living in a given geographic area or space, usually measured by a census.

Populations are studied, in particular, in a branch of ecology known as population biology, and in population genetics. In population dynamics, size, age and s*x structure, mortality, reproductive behaviour, and growth of a population are studied. In biology, an isolated population denotes farty breeding group whose members breed mostly or solely among themselves, usually as a result of physical isolation, although biologically they could breed with any members of the species. If there are several completely or nearly completely isolated populations in the global population of a taxon, these are called subpopulations. The metapopulation is a network of subpopulations in a given area (which may be global), where the individuals of the various subpopulations are able to cross uninhabitable areas of the region. Biological dispersal is one of the key elements affecting such populations; if dispersal is sufficiently low for a prolonged period of time, speciation is likely to be a consequence.

Demography is the study of human populations. Its three central foci are the processes of fertility, mortality, and migration, though the field encompasses many dimensions of population change including the family (marriage and divorce), public health, work and the labor force, and family planning. Various aspects of human behavior in populations are also studied in sociology, economics, and geography. Study of populations is almost always governed by the laws of probability, and the conclusions of the studies may thus not always be applicable to some individuals. This odd factor may be reduced by statistical means, but such a generalization may be too vague to imply anything. Demography is used extensively in marketing, which relates to economic units, such as retailers, to potential customers. For example, a coffee shop that wants to sell to a younger audience, looks at the demographics of an area to be able to appeal to this younger audience.

The title of your question surmises a relationship between population size and economic health. There is none. Take all countries in the world, pick any group by population, and you will see that the proportion of high-income to low-income countries will change very little between groups. Japan and Nigeria have approximately equal population sizes, and so do Luxembourg and Solomon Islands.

Your actual question, however, surmises a relationship population GROWTH and economic health. Robert Solow suggested that, other things being equal, high population growth should decrease the capital/labor ratio and thus lead to lower economic growth. The problem is, other things are not equal. Capital formation is not a constant; it depends on both the savings rate and international capital flows.

Population growth, on the other hand, depends on income; other things being equal, the higher the income, the lower the population growth. But again, other things are not necessarily equal; there is research that suggests that housing plays an important role, too. Families that live in single-family homes have higher fertility than families living in apartment units (this, by the way, single-handedly explains the difference in population growth between the U.S. and the rest of the industrialized world).

So, to summarize, there are more important things to the health of an economy than either population size or population growth...

The seminar was co-sponsored by IUSSP's Historical Demography Committee and the International Association of Economic History. Its objective was to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of findings concerning the relationship between population and economic change in pre-industrial Europe and in non-European regions, both in the past and more contemporary times. The various papers presented form part of a report, and a published volume, presented and discussed at the Twelfth International Economic History Congress which took place in Seville, Spain in August 24-28, 1998.

Its organizers hoped to generate research that would bring us closer to filling existing gaps in our knowledge concerning Malthusian demographic-economic dynamics. While considerable light has already been shed on these dynamics, there still remain large gaps in our understanding of the mechanisms that underlie them. At the macro-level, questions remain concerning the mechanisms by which economic forces conditioned demographic behaviour and in turn how population constrained economic growth, in both the pre-industrial European and non-European contexts. At the micro-level, we know little of how individuals and households reacted to various forms of external stress, both in the short and long-term. Although the role of migration as both a short and long-term adjustment mechanism to population pressures and economic stress has recently been emphasized in the literature, we still have limited knowledge concerning this mechanism. Similarly, it is commonly held that the relationship between population responses and economic changes attenuated as a result of demographic and economic modernization, yet the timing, direction and pace of this process are still not fully understood.

The papers presented in this seminar deal with many of these issues. They make use of long-term economic and demographic data series, original methodologies that include both macro and micro-level analytical approaches, and provide cross-cultural and comparative perspectives. The seminar consisted of seven sessions, covering such issues as household context and mortality outcome, migration as demographic mechanism, long and short-term demographic-economic dynamics and the mediating role of demographic regimes.

Household and mortality

In the first paper presented, 'Infant Mortality, Child Neglect and Child Abandonment in European History: A Comparative Analysis', Katherine Lynch explores whether conscious mortality 'strategies ' operated at the household level in the European past. By 'strategies' the author refers to parents' conscious regulation of their fertility through infanticide, child abandonment and infant and child neglect. She argues that when the social-cultural context of the period under study is taken into account it is difficult to conclude that these practices were 'normal or accepted ' by the general population or in any sense perceived as 'strategies'. She brings to bear numerous contextual and evidentiary factors. Among them, the importance and pervasiveness of Christian values which renounced infanticide and child neglect and abandonment. Others include the long history of foundling homes, established for the purpose of assisting women in dire circumstances deal with an unwanted child, and women's perception of them as temporary surrogate parents during 'critical life' situations. Likewise evidence from court documents is used to reveal that throughout the centuries the culprits of infanticide were mostly young, unmarried, poor women. That the women were treated leniently by juries reveals just how 'unnatural' these acts were believed to be. Similarly, she finds child neglect in the household did not follow any pattern or cultural norm that led parents to 'systematically target specific types of children for neglect'. Finally, she points out that for such behaviours to be deemed 'strategies' one must assume individuals believed that their environment remained stable over time. In a highly variable epidemiological regime, such an assumption is untenable.

In their study, 'Effects of Household Structure and Relationship on Mortality in Early Modern Japan: Evidence from Two North-eastern Villages', Noriko Tsuya and Satomi Kurosu examined the patterns and covariates of mortality within the household and in the context of kin relationships in two agricultural villages in North-eastern Japan in the 18th and 19th centuries. They found that both family structure and community wide factors affected individuals' mortality outcomes differently according to their age, s*x, status in the household, kin composition within the household and household socio-economic status. For example, girls under the age of 15 experienced higher probabilities of dying than boys if they came from poor households. Boys, on the other hand, experienced greater survivorship probabilities with increasing number of servants, signalling how boys benefited more than girls from increased household wealth. Adult males aged 15 to 54 benefited much more from the effects of owning land than did their spouses, attesting to differential status and obligations within the household by gender. Finally, they report that as both men and women aged their survivorship increasingly depended on family/household structure, particularly kinship ties and marital status characteristics.

In their paper, 'Price Fluctuations, Family Structure and Mortality in Two Rural Chinese Populations: A Comparison of Peasants and Serfs in 18th and 19th Century Liaoning', Cameron D. Campbell and James Z. Lee investigate how household organization mediated the demographic effects of one type of economic stress (grain price fluctuations) and those of community setting. They were particularly interested in testing the hypothesis that the most privileged household members, those who received a disproportionate share of household resources in good times, would be the most affected in bad times. A second goal was to explore how household organization mediated the demographic effects of community setting. The authors found that despite differences in overall mortality outcomes between the two villages, which they attribute to differences in the disease environment, mortality diffe