ABSTRACT
As has been pointed out by Meadows, Bruckmann, and Richardson (1982), among the issues which global modelers have agreed to disagree about is how population should be treated in a global model. The basic question is whether population should be exogenously or endogenously determined. In their survey they found that three global models (World3, Bariloche, Mesarovic-Pestel) included some feedback loops relating population growth to other parts of the model, while four models (MOIRA, SARUM, FUGI, United Nations) took the growth of population as a given (1982: 100-101). In constructing GLOBUS we chose to side with the majority and treat population growth as an exogenous input. What were the reasons for this decision?
