POVERTY AND THE POPULATION PROBLEM:EVIDENCE FROM BANGLADESH

Rapid population growth is often cited as an important correlate of high poverty rates in lowincome countries. As a result, much thought and many resources have been put into designing policies which address both poverty and the "population problem". We investigate the conceptual and empirical bases for these views and policy responses, drawing on a recent household-level survey from Bangladesh, one of the poorest and most densely populated countries in the world. We find that allowing for even modest returns to scale in household consumption reverses the oft-cited positive association between low income and large household size. Thus, adding children to a household in our sample is likely to be much less costly than often thought, and the deleterious consequences…