Fertility Control and Income Distribution in Developing Countries With National Family Planning Programmes

Development policy, by and large, has emphasized economictransfor¬mation in the direction of sustained and rapid increases in thenational product. In developing countries, however, the recent rapideconomic gains have been unequally distributed among countries, regionswithin countries and socio¬economic groups.1 As a result of sucheconomic inequality, development planners have increasingly questionedthe validity of aggregate growth as the main objective of developmentstrategy, thus turning their attention to social transformation in thedirection of a more widespread access of the population to provisions ofgovernment goods, such as education, health services and adequatehousing [35]. Such a development policy involves an interdisciplinaryand comprehensive approach in which population policy has a significantrole to play.