ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Population as Source of Growth or Poverty in Sweden: Wicksell vs. Davidsson
Author: Le Bouteillec Nathalie, Ögren Anders
The issue of population in economic thought spawned heated debates in many European countries in the nineteenth century at least until the 1930s. In Sweden neo-malthusians’ would call for overpopulation as a cause for poverty whereas the more general view would argue that the poverty was a result of institutional factors. These two different views would be articulated by economists as well and in this paper we analyse the views on population expressed by important Swedish economists during the period from the 1880s until the 1930s, focusing specifically on Knut Wicksell and David Davidsson as they were the main economists in the famous controversy on the population issue that originated in 1880 with Wicksell’s open lecture’s propagating for the use of contraceptives. We analyse their arguments, how they corresponded to their more general economic writings and how the debate related to the two important phenomena that would lead to intense debates: crises and the demographic transition. Authors Nathalie Le Bouteillec (INED, CURAPP, Université Picardie Jules Verne) and Anders Ögren (Lund University)
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