Concluding Remarks

Schumpeter, in his History of Economic Analysis, explains the “abandonment” of the theory of population, during the transition from the classical to the marginalist perspec­tive, by mainly referring to the irrelevance of the theoreticians use of hypotheses on the size and dynamic of population.

1. During the period of the consolidation of marginalist theory there was no immedi­ate abandonment of the ideas on population. In this “interregnum” the leaders of the economic theory - Bohm-Bawerk, Marshall, Walras, and Wicksell - continued to consider, at least as a hypothetical starting point, the behaviour of the population variable “even though they no longer based upon it any part of their analytic struc­tures” (Schumpeter 1954 [1997]: 890).

2. Around the end of the nineteenth century, partly through a more accurate collec­tion of statistical data, the first evidence of demographic transition began to emerge, that is, the constant decline of birth and death rates. In the 1920s this event would orientate the economists’ analysis towards research concentrated on the study of the effects of the gradual decline of the population.

3. Finally, specialization in the methods used to gather demographic data had led to the birth of demography as a discipline on the study of population behaviour, thus removing the subject from the spectre of those variables that were grist to the mill of economic analysis (ibid.).

On the first point, it has to be pointed out that the marginalist and neoclassical theoreti­cians, even though they did not develop any of their analyses starting from the behav­iour of the population, nevertheless continued to study the effects of the demographic dynamic on economic development and well-being.

Wicksell develops a model of equilibrium growth based on the concept of the optimal population maximizing individual well-being, and hence starting precisely from the consideration of the behaviour of the relevant variable. In addition, Pareto too, taking Walras’s approach as his starting point, develops a concept of “optimal population” with reference to a competitive system (see Boianovsky 2001: 117-49).

Concerning the second point, we would like to specify that the marginalist theoreti­cians, precisely because they were not interested in the direct study of the population, did not pay much attention to the evolution of demographic trends. In addition, when the economists became aware of the epoch-making changes in the demographic dynamic of the industrialized nations, they often reacted in excessively alarmed ways to the conse­quences of a presumed decline of the population (see Teitelbaum and Winter 1985).

Finally, and we are now dealing with point three, as far as the relationships between economics and demography are concerned, it is worth remembering that some econo­mists, such as Wicksell and Pareto, applied methods of demographic enquiry to their economic models, and that the “permeability” between the two disciplines, around the end of the nineteenth century, was much more marked than in the early years of the following century.

We have tried to demonstrate that in the long process of the formation of economic ideas the demographic dynamic played an important role in explaining the prospects of well-being and long-term development of societies. Reconstructing the history of the analysis enabled us to highlight the main approaches in economic thought, starting from mercantilism, to explain and, through the tools of intervention of economic policy, to try to intervene in the demographic dynamic to attain specific objectives of growth.

Claudia Sunna