POPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT
STUDY GUIDE: CRITICAL TERMS

Age-Sex Pyramid (Population Pyramid) - a series of horizontal bars that illustrate the structure of a population. The horizontal bars represent different age categories, which are placed on either side of a central vertical axis. Males are to the left of the axis, females to the right.

Brain drain - emigration of highly educated and skilled professional and technical manpower from the developing to the developed countries. India is a conspicuous example.

Carrying capacity - population that can be supported by available resources

Child death rate - the number of deaths among children 1 to 4 years of age per 1,000 children of that age in a given year.

Crude birth rate - Number of live births per 1,000 population

Crude death rate - Number of deaths per 1,000 population

Demographic Transition - the phasing out process of population growth rates from a virtually stagnant growth stage characterized by high birth and death rates, through a rapid growth stage with high birth rates and low death rates, to a stable, low growth stage in which both birth and death rates are low.

Dependency Ratio - Young (< 15 years) + Aged (> 65 years)/ Adult (15- 64 years)

Dependency Burden - that proportion of the total population of a country falling between the ages 0-15 and 64+, which is considered economically unproductive and therefore not counted in the labor force. In many LDCs the population under the age of 15 years accounts for as much as one-half of the total population, thus posing a burden to the generally smaller productive labor force and to the government which has to allocate resources to such needs as education, public health, and housing for the consumption of people who do not contribute to production.

Division of labor (new international or spatial) - in the most basic sense allocation of tasks among laborers such that each one engages in tasks that he performs most efficiently and this promotes worker specialization and thereby increases overall labor productivity (from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations). In the context of globalization increasingly we may refer to nations or regions, which specialize in tasks for which they have a comparative advantage, based upon the cost of factors of production and especially labor.

Doubling time (of population) - period that a given population size takes to increase inself by its present size. Doubling time is approximated by dividing any numerical growth rate into 70, e.g., a population growing at 2% per year will double in size approximately every 35 years.

Fertility ratio - Number of children under 5 years of age per 1,000 women of child bearing age (15-44 years)

human capital - productive investments embodied in human persons. These include skills, abilities, ideals, health, etc that result from expenditures on education, on-the-job training programs, and medical care.

Infant mortality rate - number of deaths 0-1 years/ per 1,000 live births

labor productivity - Over-population- exists whenever a reduction in the population size would enable a smaller population to earn a better living. Symptoms: famine and out migration.

migration - movement from one location to another with the intent to remain in the destination permanently and usually but not always motivated by the search for employment.

circulation - movement from location to another but the intent is to return to the origin. Stays in a destination may be up to six months or longer for purposes of crop harvesting or other temporary or seasonal work.

commuting - daily movement between residence and place of work.

Over-population - exists whenever a reduction in the population size would enable a smaller population to earn a better living. Symptoms: famine and out migration.

Under-population - where people are so few that they cannot develop their resources effectively to better their conditions of life

Population density - may be measured as a man-land or arithmetic density: number of persons/area but this is often unrealistic because it assumes an even distribution of people. In addition and a more realistic measure of density is the Physiological or Nutritional Density - number of persons/cultivated area. For example in Japan where approximately only 15 percent of land is cultivated the arithmetic density is 600 persons per sq mi whereas the physiological density is 4,000 persons per sq mi

Structure of population - refers to the age and sex composition of a population and may be assessed using an age-sex pyramid