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Population growth is said to be largely driven by two key components. Dasgupta (1995) broadly describes these components as, having children as ends and having children as assets. Having children as ends comprises reasons such as continuation of lineage and direct utility such as happiness and satisfying certain religious and/or social norms. The latter of these drivers, having children as assets, relates more closely with economic activity such as cultivating the lands and other food gathering activities. Children not only provide service to their parents in their old age, but also are key ‘assets’ that generate income for their parents. In many rural communities within LDC’s much of the land used for commercial activity is common land (Heltberg, 2002). This renders parents to have larger families and utilise their children as workers on these fields. As the theory of the Tragedy of the commons goes, those who can utilise the common land fastest are able to reap the greatest utility form the land.

The concept of carrying capacity is of particular importance when discussing overpopulation. Carrying capacity can be defined as the maximum population size which an area can sustain without reducing its ability to sustain the same population in the future. This can be further be described as 'a measure of the amount of renewable resources in the environment in units of the number of organisms these resources can support' (Roughgarden 1979, p. 305). The carrying capacity for humans as opposed to that of animals and plant species is far more complex. Humans not only command greater resources, but individual preferences and the existence of technology result in a varying carrying capacity. As a result the carrying capacity is based on culture as well as the level of economic development of a region (Daily and Ehrlich, 1992).

Poverty and population growth.

There is a general consensus that overpopulation is one of the key contributors to poverty in LDC’s. However the directional path of relationship it is often argued as it is difficult to distinguish. This argument of whether poverty is the causal effect or the resultant effect of overpopulation is one which has plagued economists for many years. Some have argued that the relationship is circular and each impacts the other (See Ehrlich et al, 1992; Titenburg, 2000). With varying opinion of the casual and effect variables, it is often difficult to solve the problems associated with both poverty and overpopulation. However, the existence of a relationship between both the components is largely accepted.

In Africa, poverty is said to results primarily from a fast growth in population and low levels of agricultural yield. In Asia, similarly poverty is said to be largely created by high population growth rates and density combined with large landlessness (UNDP, 1998). It is therefore evident that population 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。