Development as Freedom (60 page)

2.
See
Commodity Market Review 1998–1999
(Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization, 1999), p. xii. See also the detailed analysis presented in that report, and also
Global Commodity Markets: A Comprehensive Review and Price Forecast
(Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1999). In an impressive technical study of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), it is argued that there might be very significant further decline in real world prices of food between 1990 and 2020. The study anticipates further
declines
in food prices of about 15 percent for wheat, 22 percent for rice, 23 percent for maize, and 25 percent for other coarse grains. See Mark W. Rosengrant, Mercedita Agcaoili-Sombilla and Nicostrato D. Perez, “Global Food Projections to 2020: Implications for Investment,” International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, D.C., 1995.

3.
See Tim Dyson,
Population and Food: Global Trends and Future Prospects
(London and New York: Routledge, 1996), table 4.6.

4.
Dyson,
Population and Food
(1996), table 4.5.

5.
In this see my
Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), chapter 6.

6.
Note by the Secretary-General of the United Nations to the Preparatory Committee for the International Conference on Population and Development, third session, A/Conf.171/PC/5, February 18, 1994, p. 30. See also Massimo Livi Bacci,
A Concise History of World Population
, translated by Carl Ipsen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; 2nd edition, 1997).

7.
The arguments that follow draw on my earlier papers on the population problem, and in particular on “Fertility and Coercion,”
University of Chicago Law Review
63 (summer 1996).

8.
See my “Rights and Agency,”
Philosophy and Public Affairs
11 (1982), reprinted in
Consequentialism and Its Critics
, edited by S. Scheffler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), and “Rights as Goals,” in
Equality and Discrimination: Essays in Freedom and Justice
, edited by S. Guest and A. Milne (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1985).

9.
See my “Rights and Agency” (1982); “Rights as Goals” (1985);
On Ethics and Economics
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).

10.
John Stuart Mill,
On Liberty;
in J. S. Mill,
Utilitarianism, On Liberty;
Considerations on Representative Government; Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy
(London: Dent; Rutland, Vt.: Everyman Library, 1993), p. 140.

11.
I have argued elsewhere that this conflict is so pervasive that even a minimal acknowledgment of the priority of liberty can conflict with the most minimal utility-based social principle, viz., Pareto optimality. On this see my “The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal,”
Journal of Political Economy
78 (January/February 1971), reprinted in my
Choice, Welfare and Measurement
(Oxford: Blackwell; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982; republished, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), and also in, among other collections,
Philosophy and Economic Theory
, edited by Frank Hahn and Martin Hollis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). See also my
Collective Choice and Social Welfare
(San Francisco: Holden-Day, 1970; republished, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1979), “Liberty and Social Choice,”
Journal of Philosophy
80 (January 1983), and “Minimal Liberty,”
Economica
57 (1992). See the symposium on this subject in the special number devoted to it in
Analyse & Kritik
18 (1996), among quite a large literature that has addressed this question.

12.
See Massimo Livi Bacci and Gustavo De Santis, eds.,
Population and Poverty in the Developing World
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). See also Partha Dasgupta,
An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Robert Cassen et al.,
Population and Development: Old Debates, New Conclusions
(Washington D.C.: Transaction Books in Overseas Development Council, 1994); Kerstin Lindahl-Kiessling and Hans Landberg, eds.,
Population, Economic Development, and the Environment
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), among other contributions.

13.
English translation by Malthus himself, from his
Essay
on population, chapter 8, Penguin Classics, p. 123. Malthus uses here the original 1795 version of Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet’s
Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain
. For later reprints of that volume, see
Oeuvres de Condorcet
, volume 6 (Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1847; recently republished, Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1968). The passage here is on pages–7 of the 1968 reprint.

14.
Condorcet,
Esquisse;
in the translation by June Barraclough,
Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1955), pp. 188–9.

15.
Malthus,
A Summary View of the Principle of Population
(London: John Murray, 1830); in the Penguin Classics edition (1982), p. 243. Even though Malthus remained rather obtuse on the role of reason (in contrast to economic compulsion) in reducing fertility rates, he did provide a remarkably enlightening analysis of the role of food markets in the determination of food consumption of different classes and occupation groups. See his
An Investigation of the Cause of the Present High Price of Provisions
(London: 1800), and the discussions of the lessons to be learned from Malthus’s analysis in my
Poverty and Famines
(1981), appendix B, and in E. A. Wrigley, “Corn and Crisis: Malthus on the High Price of Provisions,”
Population and Development Review
25 (1999).

16.
Malthus,
A Summary View of the Principle of Population
(1982 edition), p. 243; emphasis added. Skepticism about the family’s ability to make sensible decisions led Malthus to oppose the public relief of poverty, including the English Poor Laws.

17.
On this see J. C. Caldwell,
Theory of Fertility Decline
(New York: Academic
Press, 1982); R. A. Easterlin, ed.,
Population and Economic Change in Developing Countries
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980); T. P. Schultz,
Economics of Population
(New York: Addison-Wesley, 1981); Cassen et al.,
Population and Development:
(1994). See also Anrudh K. Jain and Moni Nag, “The Importance of Female Primary Education in India,”
Economic and Political Weekly
21 (1986).

18.
Gary S. Becker,
The Economic Approach to Human Behavior
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), and
A Treatise on the Family
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). See also the paper of Robert Willis, “Economic Analysis of Fertility: Micro Foundations and Aggregate Implications,” in Lindahl-Kiessling and Landberg,
Population, Economic Development, and the Environment
(1994).

19.
On this see Nancy Birdsall, “Government, Population, and Poverty: A ‘Win-Win’ Tale,” in Lindahl-Kiessling and Landberg,
Population, Economic Development, and the Environment
(1994). Also see her “Economic Approaches to Population Growth,” in
The Handbook of Development Economics
, volume 1, edited by H. B. Chenery and T. N. Srinivasan (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1988).

20.
On this see John Bongaarts, “The Role of Family Planning Programmes in Contemporary Fertility Transitions,” in
The Continuing Demographic Transition
, edited by Gavin W. Jones et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); “Trends in Unwanted Childbearing in the Developing World,”
Studies in Family Planning
28 (December 1997); and also the literature cited there. See also Geoffrey McNicoll and Mead Cain, eds.,
Rural Development and Population: Institutions and Policy
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

21.
See World Bank,
World Development Report 1998–1999
(Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1998), table 7, p. 202. See also World Bank and Population Reference Bureau,
Success in a Challenging Environment: Fertility Decline in Bangladesh
(Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1993).

22.
See, for example, R. A. Easterlin, ed.,
Population and Economic Change in Developing Countries
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); T. P. Schultz,
Economics of Population
(New York: Addison-Wesley, 1981); J. C. Caldwell,
Theory of Fertility Decline
(1982); Nancy Birdsall, “Economic Approaches to Population Growth,” in
The Handbook of Development Economics
, volume 1, edited by H. B. Chenery and T. N. Srinivasan (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1988); Robert J. Barro and Jong-Wha Lee, “International Comparisons of Educational Attainment,” paper presented at a conference on “How Do National Policies Affect Long-Run Growth?” World Bank, Washington, D.C., 1993; Partha Dasgupta,
An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution
(1993); Robert Cassen et al.,
Population and Development
(1994); Gita Sen, Adrienne Germain and Lincoln Chen, eds.,
Population Policies Reconsidered: Health, Empowerment, and Rights
(Harvard Center for Population and Development/International Women’s Health Coalition, 1994). See also the papers of Nancy Birdsall and Robert Willis, in Lindahl-Kiessling and Landberg,
Population, Economic Development, and the Environment
(1994).

23.
Mamta Murthi, Anne-Catherine Guio and Jean Drèze, “Mortality, Fertility, and Gender Bias in India: A District Level Analysis,”
Population and Development Review
21 (December 1995), and Jean Drèze and Mamta Murthi, “Female Literacy and Fertility: Recent Census Evidence from India,” mimeographed, Centre for History and Economics, King’s College, Cambridge, 1999.

24.
See particularly an important collection of papers edited by Roger Jeffery
and Alaka Malwade Basu,
Girls’ Schooling, Women’s Autonomy and Fertility Change in South Asia
(New Delhi: Sage, 1997).

25.
A literate community can undergo value changes that one literate family surrounded by other (illiterate) families may not be able to achieve. The issue of choice of “unit” for statistical analysis is extremely important, and in this case may favor larger groups (such as regions or districts) over smaller ones (such as families).

26.
See World Bank,
World Development Report 1997
and
World Development Report 1998–1999
.

27.
Patrick E. Tyler, “Birth Control in China: Coercion and Evasion,”
New York Times
, June 25, 1995.

28.
On the general subject of reproductive freedom and its relation to the population problem, see Gita Sen, Adrienne Germain, and Lincoln Chen,
Population Policies Reconsidered
(1994); see also Gita Sen and Carmen Barroso, “After Cairo: Challenges to Women’s Organizations” in
A Commitment to the World’s Women: Perspectives for Development for Beijing and Beyond
, edited by Noeleen Heyzer (New York: UNIFEM, 1995).

29.
International Herald Tribune
, February 15, 1995, p. 4.

30.
Kerala is not, of course, a country, but a state within one. However, with its population of 29 million, as I have mentioned, it would have been one of the larger countries in the world—rather larger than Canada—had it been a country on its own. So its experience is not negligible.

31.
On these and related general issues, see my “Population: Delusion and Reality,”
New York Review of Books
, September 22, 1994. See also Robin Jeffrey,
Politics, Women, and Well-Being: How Kerala Became a “Model”
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), and V. K. Ramachandran, “Kerala’s Development Achievements,” in
Indian Development: Selected Regional Perspectives
, edited by Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996).

32.
Kerala has a higher adult female literacy rate—86 percent—than China (68 percent). In fact, the female literacy rate is higher in Kerala than in every single province in China. Also, in comparison with male and female life expectancies at birth in China of sixty-eight and seventy-one years, the 1991 figures for Kerala’s life expectancy are sixty-nine and seventy-four years, respectively. For analyses of causal influences underlying Kerala’s reduction of fertility rates, see T. N. Krishhan, “Demographic Transition in Kerala: Facts and Factors,”
Economic and Political Weekly
11 (1976), and P. N. Mari Bhat and S. L. Rajan, “Demographic Transition in Kerala Revisited,”
Economic and Political Weekly
25 (1990).

33.
For sources of these data and some further analysis, see Drèze and Sen,
India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity
(1995).

34.
Decline in fertility can be observed to some extent in these northern states as well, though it is far less fast than in the southern states. In their paper “Intensified Gender Bias in India: A Consequence of Fertility Decline” (Working Paper 95.02, Harvard Center for Population and Development, 1995), Monica Das Gupta and P. N. Mari Bhat have drawn attention to another aspect of the problem of fertility reduction, to wit, its tendency to accentuate gender bias in sex selection, in terms of sex-specific abortion as well as child mortality through neglect (both phenomena are much observed in China). In India, this seems to be much more pronounced in the northern states than in the south, and it is indeed plausible to argue that a fertility
reduction through coercive means makes this more likely (as was discussed in contrasting the situation in China vis-à-vis that in Kerala).

35.
On this see Drèze and Sen,
India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity
(1995), and the literature cited there.