In 1798, Thomas Malthus penned his famous dictum that agricultural productivity increases arithmetically while populations increase geometrically. Ever since that time, scholars have concerned themselves with the relationship between population dynamics and economic development. With the rise of the modern nation-state, interest grew in how governmental family and population policies might affect the health of national economies. At the turn of twenty-first century comes, accelerating economic globalization, the decline of communism, and the growing influence of the United Nations and other international organizations provide an increasingly complex context within which to understand family and population policy in less developed countries.

The designation of countries as "less developed" or "more developed" (or "developing" versus "developed", "newly industrializing" versus "industrialized") relies on a multidimensional construct of development, ranging from the conditions of education and health to agricultural...