Population Growth and Human Welfare

Abstract

The Catholic Church is regularly attacked as anti-economic development because it condemns artificial contraception.  In this view, population growth is an evil, supported by a simple statistical analysis that purports to present a negative relation between population growth and basic measures of economic development.  This paper is a strictly statistical investigation that disentangles the true channels through which population growth affects economic well-being: namely, controlling for the quality of the health care system, economic structure, and educational opportunities, and controlling for regional differences, it is found that the correlation between population growth and various measures of human welfare is positive or nil.