Final answer:
Population control measures are strategies used to manage population growth, which range from incentives and education to legal restrictions like Malaysia's effort to reduce its fertility rate and China's controversial one-child policy. They aim to address various concerns such as environmental sustainability, economic development, and social stability.
Step-by-step explanation:
What are Population Control Measures?
Population control measures are policies and strategies that governments and societies use to manage the growth and distribution of their population. These measures can take various forms, ranging from incentives and education to legal restrictions. Governments may implement these policies to address concerns such as overpopulation, environmental sustainability, economic development, and social stability.
Examples of Population Control Measures. In the context of Malaysia, there has been a concern that the fertility rate, even though it has dropped from 5.0 to 2.1, is still not sufficiently low to stabilize population growth effectively. The country needs to get below a rate of about 2.0 to prevent the demand for resources from outstripping economic progress.
An extreme example of population control is the one-child policy implemented by China, which enforced strict legal limits on family size and included coercive methods such as fines, forced abortions, and sterilizations. Whilst this policy has been controversial and phased out, it illustrates one of the most direct forms of population control.
Other countries, like Japan and Spain, have contrastingly looked to increase their population through different incentives due to a decline in their birth rates affecting their growth and economic sustainability.
Furthermore, societies like Tikopia have historically used cultural practices and taboos to limit their population to sustainable levels, showing that population control can also be part of traditional societal norms rather than modern state-led policies.