rapidly. The third stage follows when economic and social gains, including lower infant mortality rates, reduce the desire for large families. Birth rates and death rates then, as in the first stage, return to equilibrium, but at a much lower level. The entire process - based on the work of Frank Notestein and drawing heavily off the European experience - is known as the demographic transition (Brown 85). But, as Brown points out, theorists did not say what happens when developing countries get trapped in the second stage, unable to achieve the economic or social gains that are counted on to reduce birth rates.
What appears to be true is that the same, self-reinforcing trends, those that cause birth rates to decline as income rises, work in reverse with ecological deterioration and economic decline. Once populations expand to the point where their demands exceed the sustainable yield of local resources, forests, croplands and water supplies, they begin to c
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