The Populationist-Macroeconomic Approach

According to this approach, the increase in population, when coupled with increas­ing investment and with technological and organizational improvements, leads to an increase in income and then, ultimately, to an improvement of material well-being for the entire society.

As for the normative orientation resulting from this approach, this also belongs to those who, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and until the Second World War, looked at the issue of population from a nationalistic perspective, and therefore moved away from a strictly analytical approach. These authors highlighted the strategic role of the demographic dynamics in the international balance of power. The analyses concerning strategic demography of Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, Corrado Gini and Roy Harrod (on the definition of strategic demography see Teitelbaum and Winter 1985: ch. 2; on the populationist demographic policies at the beginning of the nineteenth century see Glass 1967) fall into this category.

Returning to analytical issues, in this heterogeneous group of authors the common features which allow us to highlight a single scheme of reasoning are essentially two. First, population is considered as an aggregate variable that considerably influences the prospects of national economic development. In the case of the mercantilists, for example, the increase of population is considered a factor that, in itself, promotes eco­nomic growth, production capacity, the flow of taxes and, last but not least, the power of the state. According to Smith, on the other hand, population growth is inserted in the well-known dynamic development process, which ties the increase in productivity to the size of the market. In Smith’s circuit of growth the population grows only through the processes allowing the development of production and the rise of wages but, at the same time, population growth contributes to the expansion of the market and thus reinforces the development process.

Secondly, and this is mainly related to normative aspects associated with the strategic role played by population, the growth of population, in a national comparative perspec­tive, provides the opportunity for sustainable economic development, and it is an advan­tage from the perspective of colonial expansion. A tendency of this approach is linked to the pseudo-scientific studies of eugenics that developed along with the social sciences between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.