Population pressure and agricultural intensity

A positive relationship between population pressure and agricultural intensity is fundamental to Boserup's thesis of agricultural growth and to several of its modifications. Correlation analysis reveals a strong positive association between the population densities and agricultural intensities of a sample of tropical subsistence agriculturalists; the variation in population densities accounts for fifty-eight percent of the variation in the logarithm of agricultural intensities. The addition of subsistence and environmental factors to the model increases the explained variation and suggests several modifications of Boserup's thesis.