In 1973, marking the completion of his first term as president of the World Bank, Robert McNamara wrote One Hunderd Countries, Two Billion People, which brings together his basic views on economic development. There is ambiguity about McNamara's belifes. He writes, “The greatest single obstacle to the economic and social advancement of the majority of the peoples in the underdeveloped world is rampant population growth.”
Before coming to the World Bank, McNamara was a professor at the Harvard Business School, president of the Ford Motor Company, and secretary of defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. A man of incredible intellectual reach, McNamara understood much about the role of capital accumulation and technological change and their contributions to economic growth. But he maintained the view that rapid population growth was a threat that would have “ catastrophic consequences” unless dealt with. “The underdeveloped world needs investment capital for a whole gamut of productive project, but nothing would be more unwise than to allow these projects to fail because they are family over whelmed by a tidal wave of population.”
The “Two Billion People” in the title of McNamara's book refers to the early 1960s when the world's population was close to 3 billion, with 2 billion, or about two -thirds of the total, living in the developing nations. Since then the world has grown, reaching 7 billion in 2011. Over 5.8 billion of these people reside in low- and middle income economies.
Despite this massive increase in numbers of people, the views of James Wolfensohn, World Bank president from 1995 to 2005, could not be more different from those of his predecessor. Wolfensohn’s speeches and publications reveal only limited reference to population growth. Most often these references indicate how population growth exacerbates another problem, whether improving access to clean water or making a dent in the numbers suffering from absolute poverty. The same is true for “population growth” is not mentioned even once.
Was McNamara unnecessarily alarmist? Or did Wolfensohn and Zoellick make irreversible mistakes by not focusing on rising population numbers? Was the United Nations similarly wrong in not including reduction in population growth as one of the original millennium development goals ( MDG; introduced in chapter2 )? We being to address these questions by reviewing the world’s population history and exploring the demographic transition that has characterized today’s high-income nations and increasing the low- and middle-income nations as well. We also consider population projections for the future before turning our attention to the complex relationship between population growth and economic development. This relationship is viewed both at an aggregate level and at the level of individual families making decisions about how many children to have. We conclude by reviewing the options nations face in pursuing policies to limit the size of their populations.