The Impacts of Population Change on Rural Society and Economy

seems intuitively obvious that changes in population size and composition affect local society and economy. More people means more consumers and service users" fewer school-age children and more elders translates into fewer teachers and school rooms on the one hand but more physicians on the other. However, in reality, the association between changes in population and changes in economy and society is neither simple nor mechanistic. Similar demographic changes in different places do not necessarily translate into the same social and economic outcomes. In this chapter, we develop a conceptual framework for examining the association between population dynamics and social and economic changes in rural areas. Further complicating this complex set of relationships is the fact that the association between population change and societal outcomes may move in both directions. Economic development, for example, may produce conditions conducive to population growth, while the opposite is also true – for example, places experiencing population growth may experience a growth in jobs, establishments and so on. While acknowledging this mutually causative process, we focus primarily on population change as the independent variable in this chapter, and examine the pathways through which changes in the size and composition of population may induce changes in social and economic organisation.