MPSC 2026 Prelims Paper-I · Question 50 of 100

This question was CANCELLED by the Maharashtra Public Service Commission. Because the Commission has struck the question out, this card carries no analysis of a correct answer and nominates none — there is no answer to nominate. What the printed page shows is worth knowing, because the defect is visible on the paper itself. The booklet is inline bilingual: each question is printed in English and in Marathi, one above the other, and the two columns are meant to be the same question. On Q50 they are not. Statement (a) in English reads that the Coale and Hoover model related to population growth and economic development in LOW income countries in the late fifties. The Marathi column of the very same statement reads 'उच्च उत्पन्न असलेल्या देशांमध्ये' — in HIGH income countries. Low has become high. That single word decides the statement. A candidate reading the English column and a candidate reading the Marathi column were being asked to judge opposite propositions about the same model, and the two of them could not both be right whichever option was keyed. Statement (b) is the same in both columns — the English 'GNP would grow faster under higher fertility' and the Marathi 'उच्च प्रजनन क्षमतेखाली जीएनपी अधिक वेगाने वाढेल' carry the same sense — so the divergence is confined to statement (a), and it is confined to one word. That is enough. With the two authoritative language versions of the question asserting different things, there is no single set of statements that a key could be applied to, and the question was withdrawn. For a candidate the practical lesson is procedural rather than academic: if you are working in Marathi and a statement about a named model or a named report reads oddly against everything you have studied, it is worth spending ten seconds on the English column of the same page. The two columns are printed on the same sheet precisely so that either may be consulted, and a mismatch between them is information — it tells you the question is in trouble, which is itself a reason to move on rather than to spend three minutes and a quarter-mark penalty resolving it.

The Commission cancelled this question, so nothing below is offered as a route to an answer; the topic, however, is real and recurs. Ansley J. Coale and Edgar M. Hoover published Population Growth and Economic Development in Low-Income Countries: A Case Study of India's Prospects with Princeton University Press in 1958. It is one of the founding works of population economics and it took India as its worked example. The authors built a simulation of the Indian economy running forward several decades and compared what happened under alternative fertility paths — one in which fertility stayed at its then-current level and others in which it declined. Their conclusion was that lower fertility would deliver higher income per head, and the mechanism ran through investment. A rapidly growing population carries a heavy burden of child dependency: a larger share of national output must go to feeding, housing and schooling children who are not yet producing, which depresses the savings available for investment. Rapid growth of the labour force also forces such investment as there is into simply equipping the new entrants — capital widening — rather than into raising the capital available per worker, which is capital deepening and is what actually raises productivity. The model has been argued over ever since, but the framework of dependency burden, savings and the widening-versus-deepening distinction remains the standard vocabulary for discussing population and growth.

Coale and Hoover's work landed at a moment when newly independent developing countries were writing their first development plans, and it became one of the intellectual supports for family planning as an instrument of economic policy rather than only of health policy. Its influence on Indian planning and on international assistance through the 1960s was considerable. Later scholarship qualified it in two directions. One line of criticism, associated with revisionist writers of whom Julian Simon in The Ultimate Resource (1981) is the best known, argued that the model understated the productive and inventive contribution of additional people and rested on assumptions about savings behaviour that the evidence did not bear out. A second line did not so much refute the model as complicate it: the demographic dividend literature points out that a fertility decline first swells the working-age share of the population, opening a window of decades in which the dependency ratio is unusually favourable and growth can accelerate — but only if the economy can employ and educate that cohort. That reframing is directly relevant to India today, and to Maharashtra, and it is the angle from which contemporary papers usually approach the population-and-growth question.

• Ansley J. Coale and Edgar M. Hoover, Population Growth and Economic Development in Low-Income Countries: A Case Study of India's Prospects, Princeton University Press, 1958 — one of the founding works of population economics, with India as its case study.
• The model's central mechanism is the dependency burden: high fertility raises the share of children in the population, diverting output to current consumption, reducing savings and therefore investment, and lowering the growth of income per head.
• It also rests on the distinction between capital widening — investment that merely equips a growing labour force with the existing amount of capital per worker — and capital deepening, which raises capital per worker and with it productivity. Rapid labour force growth forces the first at the expense of the second.
• The demographic dividend is the later and more optimistic reading of the same demographic arithmetic: as fertility falls, the working-age share of the population rises for several decades, opening a window in which growth can accelerate provided the workforce is educated and employed.
• This question was cancelled by the Maharashtra Public Service Commission. The printed English and Marathi versions of statement (a) disagree — 'low income countries' against 'उच्च उत्पन्न असलेल्या देशांमध्ये', high income countries — so the two language versions posed different propositions.

• Assuming a bilingual paper's two columns must agree. On this question they do not, and the difference is a single word inside statement (a) that reverses its meaning entirely.
• Reading Coale and Hoover as a claim that population growth is good for growth. Their argument runs the other way — that a heavy child dependency burden suppresses savings and investment and therefore income per head.
• Confusing capital widening with capital deepening. Widening equips more workers at the existing capital-labour ratio; deepening raises capital per worker. Only the second raises productivity.
• Treating the demographic dividend as automatic. It is a window created by age structure, not a benefit conferred by it; an unemployed or unschooled cohort produces no dividend at all.

Population economics is asked at MPSC mainly through named models and named policies. The named-model shape asks who wrote what and what the model concluded — Coale and Hoover, Malthus, the theory of demographic transition, the demographic dividend — and it is normally falsified by reversing the direction of a conclusion rather than by inventing an author. The named-policy shape asks the National Population Policy 2000 and its dated targets. A third shape, growing more common, is data-based and draws on Census and National Family Health Survey figures for fertility, sex ratio and age structure, often with a Maharashtra cut. Since this particular question was cancelled, the useful preparation to take from it is the model itself rather than the item: know what Coale and Hoover argued, and know the demographic dividend as the modern counterpoint.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The 1958 study 'Population Growth and Economic Development in Low-Income Countries', which took India as its case study, was written by :

  • (a)Ansley Coale and Edgar Hoover
  • (b)Simon Kuznets and Arthur Lewis
  • (c)Gunnar Myrdal and Paul Streeten
  • (d)Ragnar Nurkse and Rosenstein-Rodan

  Answer(a) Ansley Coale and Edgar Hoover. Published by Princeton University Press in 1958, it simulated the Indian economy under alternative fertility paths and concluded that lower fertility would raise income per head by easing the child dependency burden and freeing resources for investment. The other names are all real development economists of the period, but none of them wrote this study — Lewis is associated with the dual-economy model, Nurkse and Rosenstein-Rodan with balanced growth and the big push.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The term 'demographic dividend' refers to :

  • (a)the increase in national income caused by a rising birth rate
  • (b)the growth potential created when the working-age share of the population rises as fertility declines
  • (c)the transfer payments made to elderly dependants by a shrinking workforce
  • (d)the fall in per capita income that follows a rise in the dependency ratio

  Answer(b) the growth potential created when the working-age share of the population rises as fertility declines. As birth rates fall, the cohort of children shrinks relative to the working-age population, so the dependency ratio improves for several decades and a larger share of the population is available to produce and to save. The word potential matters: the dividend is a window, and it is realised only if that workforce is educated, healthy and actually employed.