AQA Geography 2016 spec Population Growth Control case studies.

Case Studies for Population Growth unit

CHINA

China has the world's largest population, with over 1.3 billion people. Different policies have been used to try and control the rapidly growing population, but the most important is the 'infamous' one child policy, which was introduced in 1979.

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Couples that only have one child are given benefits - for example: Longer maternity leave Better housing Free education. Couples that have more than one child don't get these benefits, and are fined part of their income instead.

... But there are exceptions.

In some rural areas, couples are allowed a second child if... The first child is a girl If the first child has a physical disability This is because in rural areas, children are still needed to work on farms.

If one/both of the parents have a disability, or if both parents are only children, they can also have another child. This is so that, when the parents are older, there are enough people to look after the parents.

But how effective has this been?

It has prevented up to 400 million births - dropping the fertility rate from 5.7 (1970) to 1.8 in the present day.

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Some people believe it wasn't just this policy that was to blame about the population control. There was another policy set out about leaving longer gaps between having children. Also, now that China is wealthier, some say that people don't want so many children as they can buy nice things for themselves.

INDONESIA

Indonesia is a country made up of 100s of Islands. It has the fourth largest population in the world - over 240 million people.The population isn't distributed evenly - around 130m live on the island of Java.

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This has lead to many social and economic problems in the densely populated islands, for example: A lack of services and housing unemployment poverty

In 1960, the government began the transmigration policy. This policy moves people from the densely populated islands, for example, Java, onto the less populated islands, like Sumatra.

But how effective was this?

Millions of people have been moved, but the population isn't still evenly distributed.Not all of the people who moved could escape poverty, either as they couldn't farm the land as it was too poor, or they didn't have the skills necessary to.Lots of these islands were already occupied by natives, causing conflicts between natives + immigrants.

How do these case studies relate to sustainable development?

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Sustainable development is when a country develops in a way that means people of today get what they want and need, but without stopping other people in the future from getting what they want or need.

What is 'sustainable development'?

China have done this well because they have reduced their population size, meaning that less resources will be needed as there are less people. China are working towards sustainable development.

How have China done this?

What about Indonesia?

Indonesia haven't done as well as China at sustainable development, because the population size hasn't been reduced or controlled at all. This means that there are still many resources needed for such a large population, and they aren't even distributed evenly still. Plans and new policies are still needed for Indonesia to head towards sustainable development.