ABSTRACT
Any policy set to affect the rate of population growth is obviously based on a judgment about whether the present number of people and the current increase or decrease are desirable by one yardstick or another. In fact, the pronatalist policies of the mercantilist era proved to be not very efficacious. In short, the antinatalist programs carried into the Third World had to cope with not only bureaucratic sloth and corruption but also at least initial doubts about their necessity or urgency. With the frequently general purpose set for family-planning programs, they have often been pronounced "successful" by different, not necessarily complementary, criteria. The category of nations can be more fully analyzed with a detailed exposition on one of them, Taiwan, which was also the site of one of the major efforts to introduce family planning. Properly speaking, there is only one legitimate measure of success for a program that was instituted to reduce a nation's fertility.
