Managing Population Growth

Governments do try to steer how fast their population grows. Some go straight at it and target birth rates. Others change schools, jobs and hospitals, and let birth rates move on their own. The second kind is slower, but it usually sticks — and that contrast is what exam questions are really testing.

The two families of policy

Split everything into direct and indirect. Once a policy is in the right box, you already know most of what you need to say about it.

Anti-natalist policies: pushing births down

These are used where a population is growing faster than housing, water, schools and jobs can keep up. The tools fall into three groups.

• Education and persuasion — campaigns promoting smaller families, and teaching about family planning.
• Access to contraception — free or cheap birth control and reproductive health clinics. This is often the cheapest and least controversial measure.
• Financial pressure — tax breaks, housing priority or school places for smaller families, and penalties for larger ones.

The best-known example is China’s one-child policy, introduced in 1979 and phased out from 2016. Births fell sharply. But the policy left China with a very small generation now moving into middle age, an unbalanced sex ratio, and a rapidly ageing population it is still dealing with today.

Vietnam’s two-child policy from the 1980s worked in a similar way, using penalties for larger families alongside housing and education benefits for those who complied.

Pro-natalist policies: pulling births up

Where fertility has fallen well below replacement level, governments start worrying about a shrinking workforce and a growing bill for pensions and care. Pro-natalist policies try to make having children easier and cheaper.

• Money — cash payments at birth, child benefit, tax relief for larger families. France has offered support of this kind since the Code de la Famille of 1939.
• Time — long, well-paid parental leave that both parents can share, as in Sweden.
• Childcare — subsidised nurseries so a parent can return to work without losing most of their income.
• Culture — campaigns promoting family life, though this is the weakest tool of the four.

Migration policies

Migration is the fastest way to change a population, because it does not have to wait for anyone to grow up. Countries with labour shortages, such as Germany, have encouraged immigration to fill jobs and slow the ageing of their workforce. Others use a points system, like Australia, to select for particular skills.

Some countries encourage emigration instead, to relieve pressure at home and bring in money that migrants send back to their families. The risk is brain drain: the doctors, nurses and engineers a country trained leave, and the shortage they leave behind is worse than the crowding they solved.

Indirect policies: change the conditions, not the birth rate

These policies are not aimed at population at all. A government builds hospitals because it wants healthier people. It keeps girls in school because that is a right. Birth rates fall anyway. That makes indirect policies slower, but far more durable and far less resented.

Economic policies

In poorer societies there are real reasons why large families make sense. Children can bring income to a farm or family business. Without pensions, children are the pension. And where child mortality is high, parents may have more children so that some survive.

Jobs, rising wages and a working welfare system remove all three pressures at once. Families stop needing children as insurance, so they have fewer and invest more in each one.

Education and gender equality

This is the strongest lever anyone has found. When girls stay in school longer, they marry later, have their first child later, have better information about contraception, and are far more likely to enter paid work. Each of those pushes fertility down, and they reinforce one another.

Health and welfare policies

Better maternal and child healthcare cuts infant mortality. Once parents can be confident their children will survive, they stop having extra children as insurance. So healthcare lowers the death rate first and the birth rate afterwards — which is exactly why populations grow rapidly for a while before settling down.