Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T15:52:52.888Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

BECKER AND THE DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2015

Ronald Lee
Ronald Lee*
Affiliation:
University of California, USA
Get access

Extract

It was a different era when Gary Becker did his groundbreaking work on the economics of fertility, during the years from the late 1950 through the early 1990s. There was great concern then about the “population explosion” due to sustained high fertility in the developing world after mortality declined following World War II. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published “The Population Bomb” predicting disaster and mass starvation due to rapid population growth: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines – hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death. . . .” Robert McNamara, then the President of the World Bank, in 1984 said “Short of thermonuclear war itself, population growth is the gravest issue the world faces over the decades immediately ahead. If we do not act, the problem will be solved by famine, riots, insurrection and war.”

Keywords

Beckerintergenerational transferdemographyfertilitytransitionvalue of timequantity–qualityhuman capital
Type
Special Section: Essays in honor of Gary Becker
Information
Journal of Demographic Economics , Volume 81 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 67 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © Université catholique de Louvain 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Becker, G. and Barro, R. (1988) A reformulation of the economic theory of fertility. Quarterly Journal of Economics 103 (1), 1–25.Google Scholar
Becker, G. S. (1960) An economic analysis of fertility. In: Demographic and Economic Change in Developed Countries, pp. 209–240. National Bureau of Economic Research, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Becker, G. S. (1991) A Treatise on the Family, 2nd ed.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Becker, G. S. and Lewis, H. G. (1973) On the Interaction between the Quantity and Quality of Children. The Journal of Political Economy, vol. 81 (2), Part 2: New Economic Approaches to Fertility (Mar. - Apr.), pp. S279-S288.Google Scholar
Becker, G. S. and Murphy, K. M. (1988), Journal of Law and Economics, April, vol. 31(1), pp. 1–18.Google Scholar
Caldwell, J. C. (1976) Toward a restatement of demographic transition theory. Population and Development Review 2 (3/4), 321–366.Google Scholar
Davis, K. (1963) The theory of change and response in modern demographic history. Population Index 29 (4), 345–366.Google ScholarPubMed
Easterlin, R. A. (1969) Towards a socio-economic theory of fertility: a survey of recent research on economic factors in American fertility. In Behrman, S. J.et al. (eds.), Fertility and Family Planning: A World View. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Lee, R. (2003) The demographic transition: Three centuries of fundamental change. Journal of Economic Perspectives 17 (4), 167–190.Google Scholar
Leibenstein, H. (1957) Economic Backwardness and Economic Growth, New York: Wiley and Sons.Google Scholar
Mincer, J. (1963) Market Prices, Opportunity Costs, and Income Effects. In Christ, C. F. (ed.), Measurement in Economics: Studies in Mathematical Economics and Econometrics in Memory of Yehuda Grunfield, pp. 67–82. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Notestein, F. W. (1953) Economic problems of population change. Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference of Agricultural Economists, pp. 13–31. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Willis, R. (1994) Economic analysis of fertility: micro-foundations and aggregate implications. In Kiessling, K. L. and Landberg, H. (eds.), Population and Economic Development and the Environment, pp. 139–172. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar