ABSTRACT
To Yujiro Hayami and Masao Kikuchi, “the basic force inducing agrarian change in Asia [is] the decline in the return to land resulting from the strong population pressure that tends to outpace efforts to augment land by means of improvements in agricultural technology and land infrastructure.” The demographic giants, India and China, have no such laid-out path to follow: what industrialization will mean for them will only slowly become clear. The most significant contrast between societies in terms of employment effects of population growth is between those in which local economic organization is maintained more or less intact under growth and those in which it is not. Technological change alters the price structure within which schooling and fertility decisions are taken, and leads to a substitution of child-quality for child-quantity. If agricultural output keeps up with population growth, a tenuous stability can be maintained notwithstanding the extraordinarily high rural densities already reached.
