Geometric Progression in Population and Arithmetic Increase in Food Production: Evaluating Malthusian Population in Context of Pakistan

Abstract

The objective of the study is to evaluate Malthusian theory of population in an actually sense where the population growth is increasing geometrically while food production increases arithmetically, by considering a case study of Pakistan economy due to its high annual population percentage growth rate, which could be cumbersome for the economy in terms of food security issues. As per our knowledge, this is the first study that evaluated Malthusian view of population in its actually sense and included geometric series of population growth as explanatory factors, by taking a time series data set from 1975-2016. The results show that geometric series of population growth at 2^nd, 4^th, 16^th, 256^th and 65526^th confirmed the positive relationship with the food production with the coefficient elasticities of 1.054%, 0.527%, 0.263%, 0.131%, and 0.065% respectively. On the basis of decreasing percentage elasticity at different geometric series of population growth, it is quite evident that the elasticities goes down from 1 to 1 corresponding relationship to 0.065%, which validate the Malthusian theory of population, as earth’s resources are limited and each and every additional increment in the population growth exhausts food production, which ultimately leads to starvation and hunger.  The study conclude that Pakistan’s economy should have to increase agricultural production to meet the growing needs of the country’s population, as Malthusian does not advocate against the family planning, therefore, we left the unfilled space for the policy makers to filled the space by strong policies for healthy population growth and high food production in a country.