It will succeed best where it involves low costs and high returns - as with energy conservation, soil and water conservation, or agroforestry. But it cannot do the job alone. Priority for human resource development Action on population may be the most promising avenue of all. It offers not just slower growth of numbers, and lower eventual totals. Fewer, better timed births also promise lower infant mortality, improved mother and child health, and better nutrition and education.
Strong evidence suggests economic benefits, too.
This was not so much because faster economic growth leads to slower population growth. Population growth in 1965-80 explained 23 per cent of the variation in economic growth in developing countries in the 1980s. But economic growth in the earlier period explained only 7 per cent of the variation in population growth in the 1980s. Change in reproductive behaviour can move as fast as the speediest shift in technology. In Thailand and Kerala fertility dropped from 6.5 to 2.3 children per woman in only twenty years.