Population and environment
Panayotou, T.
The international yearbook of environmental and resource economics 2000/2001 a survey of current issues: 148-196
2001
DOI: 10.1023/a:1017109124021Document Number: 298637
This chapter reviews the literature on population and environment to identify the main strands of thought and the salient features and assumptions that lie behind them. It begins with a review of the historical perspective from Malthus and his capitalist and socialist critics, through Boserup's thesis and other neoclassical economists, to the recent ideological war between the 'neo-Malthusians and the 'cornucopians'. Section 3 reviews and assesses the evidence on the interaction between population and the environment, focusing on selected natural and environmental resources: land use; water use; local pollution; deforestation; and climate change. The following 2 sections review selected recent macro and micro perspectives. The new macro perspective introduces the environment-income relationship (known also as the Environmental Kuznets Curve) and examines the role of population growth and density in mediating this relationship. The new micro perspective introduces the feedbacks between population growth, poverty, and environmental degradation and examines the role of gender in decision making and the role played by children as economic assets in fertility decisions in a world market with policy failures. The final section carries out a comparative assessment of predictions, approaches and methods employed in the literature to explain the wide variation in findings and predictions.