Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/194814 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2019
Series/Report no.: 
Darmstadt Discussion Papers in Economics No. 235
Publisher: 
Technische Universität Darmstadt, Department of Law and Economics, Darmstadt
Abstract: 
This work seeks to answer the "population question," i.e. the effect of population growth on production per capita. This question has lingered in economic thought for centuries and to this day two general lines of thought can be identified, which might be marked as the "optimist" and the "pessimist" view. While the optimists claim that an increase in population will - chiefly owed to concomitant specialization and technological progress - raise average production per capita, the pessimists maintain that the latter would decline as a result of resources becoming relatively more scarce. Integrating both approaches and using a neoclassical framework, this work intends to show that sustainably increasing productivity is predominantly the result of reducing too high fertility toward a lower level such that diminishing returns are outweighed by the benefits from labor division. The paper argues that the historical reduction of fertility can almost completely explain long-run development.
Subjects: 
Population Question
Division of Labor
Diminishing Returns
Demographic Transition
Economic Development
Classical Growth Theory
Neoclassical Growth Theory
Unified Growth Theory
History of Economic Thought
JEL: 
B12
B22
J1
O47
N01
N3
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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