Ester Boserup

Ester Boserup (May 18, 1910 – September 24, 1999), was a Danish economist. She studied economic and agricultural development, worked at the United Nations as well as other international organizations, and she wrote several books.

Her most notable book is The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure. This "classic ... work on agricultural intensification" presents a "dynamic analysis embracing all types of primitive agriculture." (Boserup, E. 1965. p 13) The work challenges the assumption dating back to Malthus’s time (and still held in many quarters) that agricultural methods determine population (via food supply). Instead, Boserup argued that population determines agricultural methods. A major point of her book is that "necessity is the mother of invention".