The return of Malthus? Resource constraints in an era of declining population growth

Abstract

Will natural resources comprise an important constraint on economic development in the 21st century? We use a macroeconomic model (MAVA) to demonstrate the precise nature of this problem. First, we employ the model to demonstrate that resource constraints do not substantially limit future economic growth under parametric conditions prevailing in the period 1960–2010. Second, we examine the sorts of changed conditions that are unavoidable in the coming century and demonstrate that declining population growth (and the increased dependency rates this implies) is likely to result in increasingly important resource constraints. Ironically, it is the decline in population growth rates—and not the opposite—that may occasion the return of Malthusian constraints.11Tim Swanson, holder of the André Hoffmann Chair of Environmental Economics at the Graduate Institute, wishes to acknowledge the generous support of André Hoffmann and the André Hoffmann Foundation for this work. This paper has benefited from the contributions of numerous research assistants and collaborators over the course of many years: Zacharias Ziegelhofer, Simon Neumuller, Arun Jacob, Derek Eaton, Ozgun Haznedar and Simon Dietz. We are grateful to the MAVA Foundation for providing funding for the work of all of these colleagues as well as that of the co-authors in the context of the “Human Niche project”. We also thank Jesus College for hosting the New Malthusianism workshop in which this paper was first presented, December 2018. We also wish to thank seminar audiences at the University of Cape Town, Beijing University, International Food Policy Resources Institute, Resources for the Future, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Finally, we are grateful for comments from two referees and an editor of this journal.