ECO612 Complete Handouts

Dear students, these handouts are designed to help you understand some basic concepts and develop your analytical and computational. However, to fully understand your course contents please watch video lectures and study from book. For most of the reading material you will find from your book “Population Reference Bureau’s Population Handbook (Sixth edition)” which is available online at: or you can easily search through Google.

Topic 001: An introduction to Population Economics

Population Economics

Population Economics is a study of Application of Economic Analysis to demography

In other words, it is an application of economics laws and theories to analyze population and its issues. As the name suggests, to fully understand the concepts of Population Economics we need to have knowledge of two subjects, Population/demography and Economics

So students, before, we start studying population economics, we will try to understand subjects of demography and economics first.

If we define demography then it is a scientific study of human population, its characteristics and trends

According to one of the pioneer demographers, Guillard (1855) “Demography is the mathematical knowledge of populations, their general movements, and their physical, civil, intellectual and moral state”

Topic 002: What is the subject of Economics?

Economics is a study which is based upon two main assumptions or philosophies

1. Resources are scarce and Limited
2. Desires are unlimited

So limited resources and unlimited desires of human create a problem which is known as Economic problem, to solve that problem we study the subject of economics

As there exists an imbalance between desires and resource so we need to make a choice. Economics teaches us how to make a rational choice, how to generate resources, how to

Lesson 01

Population Economics

of economics

Topic 003: Integration of Demography and Economics

As we have defined economics and demography separately now, we will define subject of population economics and explain what type of questions or issues it try to solve Population economics is the application of economic theories to population analysis. In Population Economics we try to find answers of some very important questions related to social and economic aspects of individual and collective life

Q1. What is the relationship between population and resources?

Q2. Why some nations are rich and some are poor and how population affects economic and social development of a country?

Q3. Is population a reason of poverty?

Q4. Why there is unemployment among people?

Q5. How family size affects life style of people?

Q6. What are problems or issues we are facing in our society?

Q7. Why Pakistan is having highest dropout ratio in the world?

Q8. Who are ageing societies and what will be their future?

Q9. What is the future of world population?

Q10. What are the social evils we are facing in our society?

Practice question

Can you write scope or importance of population of Economics with the help of above questions? How this course can help you and your country?

Topic 004: Objectives of the course

•  Understand basic concepts and theories of Population Economics.
•  Analyze past, current and future trends of population change
•  To analyze demographic profile of Pakistan, its comparative position in terms of population and resources
•  To teach about the factors that affects population change
•  Use census and other population data sources to calculate, analyze and interpret different demographic and socio-economic characteristics of a population.

spend resource, or how to become Rich are necessary questions of economics. In nutshell, maintaining a balance between desires and resources, is one of the fundamental objectives

•  To Understand basic concepts of fertility, its determinants, calculations and analyze different case studies
•  To draw and interpret different graphs through online tools
•  Critically analyze population policies of different countries.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course students should be able

•  Calculate and interpret different demographic indicators
•  Use demographic data sources to analyze past current and future trends of population data
•  Understand debate of population and economic development
•  Use of interactive graph, charts and tables
•  Calculate different measures of demography like mortality, fertility, migration etc.
•  To understand and analyze pessimists and optimists’ views of population and economic development.

BASIC TEXT BOOKS

1. PRB’s Population Handbook (2011, 6th edition), by Arthur Haupt, Thomas T. Kane, and Carl Haub
2. Population: An Introduction to Concepts and Issue by John R. Week, 9th edition, Thomson Publishers

Online Links

Useful links for reading materials and data sources United Nations Population Division's website:

World Population Prospect 2017: Website of United Nations Population Division, Policy Section:

Our world in data:

Topic 005: Learning techniques

Students, during this course we will learn through

Lectures and handouts Books Online resources Software

•  The art of questioning (The beauty of question is one‐ half of knowledge) Ability to differentiate myths from reality