ABSTRACT
Neither this introduction nor the collection of papers that follows is intended to be a summary and review of recent work on the relations between fertility and ‘development’ or ‘under-development’ in poor societies or of the implications of these for economic and social policy. This is partly because good reviews already exist [ Cassen, 1976; Ridker, 1976: Birdsall, 1977 ]; partly because in the collection itself McNicoll briefly describes what he calls the ‘consensus’ of opinion in this work; and partly because the criticisms of this ‘consensus’ are now becoming so frequent and familiar as perhaps to make it more important to think about how one might improve on it. Accordingly, the collection is intended briefly to review some of these criticisms, to make some programmatic remarks about how one might proceed, and most importantly to try to show by example what doing so could look like and achieve.
