Of population growth, poverty reduction

On May 5,  Daniel Kalinaki, Nation Media and Uganda’s renown journalist weighed in on the puzzle of Uganda’s three decades 6 per cent growth that has been unaccompanied by a significant reduction in poverty levels. 

Kalinaki’s thesis promotes the view that rapidly expanding population growth at 3.3 per cent has undercut the three-decade growth in income, which explains the intractable and resilient levels of poverty. 
The puzzle couldn’t be much more relevant and exigent for policymakers to attend to; however, the explanation he provides is highly questionable and evidentiary problematic. 

Gary Becker, Bloom Canning, and David Canning theoretical work that has resulted from the experiential and empirical study of western advanced societies, East Asian countries and most recently Mauritius, point to a different kind of logic within, which economic growth/income growth, fertility reduction and population growth operate. 
Gary Becker argues that economic growth raises household incomes and produces new conditions that impact on household fertility and population growth in two ways: first, the immediate effect is improvement in standards of living. 

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This tends to discourage couples from desiring additional children, because adding another child often has an attenuating effect on the achieved standards of living.
   Second, a rise in income also encourages couples to make more investment in improving household labour by increasing education and health spending, because future jobs within the economy will demand highly skilled labourforce. This translates into an increase in the cost of raising a child. 

The combined effect of changes brought about by economic growth, therefore, is a rise in opportunity cost of having a child. Thus, couples will inevitably prefer fewer over more children in such circumstances. Through this logic then, how can we make sense of the puzzle Kalinaki sets up? Well, the answer may lie in interrogating the drivers of Uganda’s economic growth over the past three decades. 
According the Ministry of Finance annual budget reports, there has been a perennial emphasis on the fact that Uganda’s growth has been largely concentrated in low value services with limited capacity to generate enough jobs and income changes at the household level, substantial enough to generate the income-fertility reducing effects that Becker and others underline. 

Income per capita, for example, has only marginally increased by $500 from $260 in 2000 to $800 in 2022. 
Agriculture productivity on which the bulk of the Uganda’s high fertility generating rural population survives has been in perpetuate decline.
 According to the Bank of Uganda statistical abstract reports, agriculture as a share of GDP has reduced from 54 percent in 1990s to 24 percent. Yet employment in agriculture remains at 72 percent. 
This hardly represents a shift in the structure of the economy. Perhaps this explains why fertility in both rural areas and urban ones has marginally declined; rural fertility has reduced from 7.6 in 1988 to 5.9 children in 2016 whereas urban fertility has reduced from 5.7 to 4.0 children over the same period according to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics.
 
Credit to government efforts, however, effective health interventions mainly immunisation has had a dramatic impact of mortality decline.  Under five mortality, for example, has significantly declined from 188.2 for every 1,000 live births in 1988 to 64 in 2016. It is this imbalance between fertility and childhood mortality that has fuelled rapid population growth.
  So, whereas Kalinaki is correct to correlate high population growth with high poverty levels, a sharper analytical assessment of the evidence reveals population growth to be more of the outcome rather than the cause of poverty levels. 
It is lackluster growth that has not generated substantially rise in income to warrant a decline in fertility, which would in fact bolster income growth.

 Without a robust economic growth policy regime that sustains income growth, all the solutions Kalinaki proposes from increased education, boosting access to reproductive services, while desirable, can only provide a temporary, and potentially underwhelming solution in the long run fertility and population growth reduction. 

The author, Mr Michael Buteera Mugisha, is a PhD Candidate at the London School of Economics, lecturer at Makerere