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316 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 1 (1958)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0316 and id is 1 raw text is: Recent Population Trends in the New World:
An Over-all View
By KINGSLEY DAVIS
Abstract: The Western Hemisphere has been leading the world in population
growth. Although the United States-Canadian rate of increase is high in com-
parison to most other industrial nations, it is the Latin American countries that
are contributing most to the over-all increase. These countries as a whole ex-
ceed the growth rate in any other major area of the world. Whereas industrial
northern America has experienced a postwar upsurge in population due to in-
creased fertility, the tremendous gains in Latin America have been made because
of sharply declining mortality. The consequences of the amazing rate of popu-
lation growth depend in part upon whether economic development itself or ex-
ternal factors have brought down the death rate.

THE WESTERN Hemisphere, per-
haps because of its extreme con-
trasts, has seldom been treated demo-
graphically as a single region. Yet
without wasting words to define a myth-
ical true region, we can say that the
Americas have more in common than is
ordinarily stated and that their differ-
ences are in many ways complementary
and interdependent. Each American
nation is nearer to several other Ameri-
can countries than to any non-American
country, and each has peculiarities that
give it specialization within the diversi-
fied economy of the entire hemisphere.
The foreign trade of these countries is
predominantly within the region. Re-
cently, for example, 55 per cent of the
exports of twelve Latin American states
went to, and 62 per cent of the imports
came from, other American countries;
in 1956 the United States exports going
to the rest of the Americas represented
41.5 per cent of the total value, and the
imports coming from the Americas rep-
resented 54.3 per cent of the total.
Foreign travel is also heavily within the

hemisphere, as is foreign investment.
In 1955 the value of United States di-
rect investment in Canada and the Latin
American republics (excluding depend-
encies) was estimated to be 68 per cent
of all of this country's foreign direct in-
vestment. In general, barriers are lower
for intra-American commerce and for
intra-American migration than for ex-
ternal movements of goods and people.
This interdependence would be less if
it were not for at least two broad bases
of similarity which, in addition to geo-
graphical contiguity, the Americas pos-
sess in common: first, the dominant in-
stitutional structure and intellectual out-
look derive from Europe; second, these
elements have everywhere been modified
by New World conditions. Sharp cul-
tural differences exist-some growing
out of the divergent regions of Europe
itself and some out of the persistence of
indigenous cultures or the stage of eco-
nomic development-but the common
European    background   and   common
transplantation into a new region have
given the peoples of this part of the

Kingsley Davis, Ph.D., Berkeley, Calif., is Professor of Sociology and Social Institu-
tions at the University of California, Berkeley. He formerly taught at Columbia, Prince-
ton, and other universities and in 1956-57 was a Fellow of the Center for Advanced
Study in the Behavioral Sciences. In 1945 he edited a volume of THE ANNALS on World
Population in Transition. He is currently directing a five-year project, International
Urban Research, at the University of California.

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