The essays collected in this volume celebrate the 50th anniversary of the journal Population and Development Review (PDR). The launching of PDR in September 1975 occurred at a time of great turmoil in the population field. Starting in the 1950s, concern about the adverse effects of rapid population growth on development and the environment grew rapidly. Influential books such as Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962), The Population Bomb by Paul R. Ehrlich (1968), and Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows et al.(1972) predicted a gloomy future for humanity with environmental constraints putting supposedly insurmountable limits on improvements in human welfare. Large famines in Asia in the 1950s and 1960s and oil crises in the early 1970s reinforced these concerns. In addition, economists such as Coale and Hoover (1958) argued that rapid population growth and high birth rates hampered economic growth.
By 1970, many governments in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) were convinced that high birth rates impeded economic development and were willing to act. The main policy intervention to reduce high fertility at that time was the implementation of voluntary family planning programs providing women ready access to and information about contraception with the goal of avoiding unplanned births and abortions. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the international family planning movement expanded rapidly with technical support and ample funding from international donors.
By the early 1970s, concerns about the impact of rapid population growth had risen sufficiently high on the global agenda that the United Nations organized its first International Conference on Population held in 1974 in Bucharest and attended by more than 1400 delegates from 136 countries. The conference was contentious because high-income countries sought to promote the wider adoption of family planning while many LMIC governments wanted more support for reductions in poverty. The statement “Development is the best contraceptive” made by Indian representative Dr. Karan Singh highlighted the changing perspective and the need for a more balanced approach to population policy.
The Bucharest debate had a lasting impact on the field and the Population Council. From the 1950s onward, the Council was a leader in international technical assistance in family planning and contraceptive development and in 1963 began publishing the journal Studies in Family Planning. After considerable internal debate, the Council management decided to broaden the focus of the organization; the publication of a new journal called Population and Development Review was a key step in that process. Paul Demeny joined the Population Council in 1973 and became its founding editor. After his retirement in 2012, Geoffrey McNicoll and Landis MacKellar took over as editors. Current editors Raya Muttarak and Joshua Wilde were appointed in 2022. Paul Demeny passed away in December 2024, and an In Memoriam by Geoffrey McNicoll is included in this special issue.
PDR’s main interests were and remain the relationships between population and social, economic, and environmental change, and related issues of public policy. From its inception, the journal aimed to be accessible toa broad range of readers in social sciences and public affairs. Combining readability with scholarship, the journal drew on high-level social science expertise in economics, anthropology, demography, sociology, and political science, to offer challenging ideas, provocative analysis, and critical insights.
Over the past 50 years, PDR readers have been kept informed about the rich debates and controversies surrounding the interaction between population and development as the world has experienced an unprecedented expansion in human numbers as well as record gains in human welfare. Co-editor Ridhi Kashyap and Aasli Abdi Nur provide a computational analysis of PDR’s research themes and authorship trends over time to highlight some of the journal’s key topics and themes. Their review highlights how PDR compares with two other long-standing English language population journals, Demography and Population Studies.