Publication Title: Population and Development Review

Pages: 97-130

Abstract: How does population growth affect economic growth? More concretely, in the context of a high-fertility developing country, how much higher would income per capita be if the fertility rate were to fall by a specified amount? This is an old question in economics, going back at least to Malthus. Over the last half century, the consensus view has shifted from fertility declines having strong effects, to their not being very important, and recently back toward assigning them some significance (Sinding 2009; Das Gupta, Bongaarts, and Cleland 2011).