Old Age Security with Fewer Children
Less developed countries can promote reduced fertility and slower population growth while still supporting the idea of old age security through children. If parents have enough children to provide a high probability of one son surviving until the father is age 65 they will have had many children even if the father has a vasectomy once having reached the larger family size. The interval between generations will be short and natural increase rapid. Instead governments should encourage couples to adopt the "always a son" strategy whereby parents have a son as soon as possible and then practice contraception as long as he survives making use of only reversible contraceptive techniques. This strategy is in accord with most traditional societies values since it means having children soon until a son is born who survives and hence is presumbably more readily acceptable. Less developed countries and citizens can and perhaps should rely upon surviving children to support older parents. Insofar as security through children is practical governments should refrain from introducing financial systems of old age support that are premature given the development stage of the national economy. This strategy is comparable with the slow population growth rate necessary for accelerated economic development if life expectancies at birth are not very low. A national objective of lower mortality rates is compatible with reduced fertility for economic development and sufficient fertility for old age security. With lower mortality rates parents can achieve their old age insurance goals yet have their children late which means fewer children die that have to replaced. Spacing not only prevents unwanted births but also reduces the number of needed births.
Economic Worth of preventing death at different ages in developing countries
Public health programmes in less developed countries lack the resources to care for more than a very small fraction of their populations. Medical care is allocated almost by accident, with those living near a clinic usually obtaining the best care. Preferably, such care should be rationed among people according to a more explicit and justifiable criterion, and such a criterion could have an economic basis. Economically, it is more important to prevent the premature death of some persons than others, depending upon education, sex and age. Considering the age element only, preventing the death of a man of age 30 is ordinarily more worthwhile to his national economy than preventing the death of a young child of 5 years. In fact every living person, depending on age, typically has a present capitalized value to the economy. This is based on his expected marginal additions to national output and his expected average subtractions as a consumer from it. These expected production and consumption streams should be discounted at a rate comparable to the marginal productivity of capital in the economy. Sample calculations of such present values indicate that infants typically have negative values at time of birth. Hence a marginal reduction in births through limited birth control expenditures is economically desirable.
The Economics of Government Payments to Limit Population: A Comment
Maximization of income per capita is generally considered the most important objective of economic development programs. Although, by definition, changes in income per capita are determined by changes in total income and population, conscious "manipulation" of the population variable in order to achieve greater increases in per capita income is commonly considered as being beyond the legitimate domain of economic policy. But population trends are not immutable; policy measures presumably may be devised to influence them in a desired direction. It follows that on purely economic grounds an argument can be made for, or against, an anti-natalist policy by comparing the economic cost of such a policy and the benefits derived from it. In the case of many underdeveloped countries where the desirability of slowing down the rate of population increase, or at least that of avoiding the expected acceleration of that rate, is generally recognized, discussion of the economics of government promoted birth control may be of more than theoretical interest.