The population of the developing world has doubled since 1965 and now stands at 4.8 billion. This growth in human numbers has been a principal cause of a rising demand for food, water, and other life-sustaining resources in the past and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. The...

Period life expectancy is calculated from age-specific death rates using life table methods that are among the oldest and most widely employed tools of demography. These methods are rarely questioned, much less criticized. Yet changing age patterns of adult mortality in countries with high life...

Books reviewed in this article: Copyright 2002 by The Population Council, Inc..

This study provides a summary of recently proposed alternatives period measures of "longevity" and assesses whether empirical differences between these measures are consistent with predictions from analytic studies. Particular attention is given to the tempo effect. Three of the five period...

There is a very large but scattered literature debating the economic implications of high fertility. This paper reviews the literature on three themes: (a) Does high fertility affect low-income countries'prospects for economic growth and poverty reduction? (b) Does population growth exacerbate...