Since the onset of modernisation the world population has doubled several times and will soon reach 6 billion of people. The annual rate of increase in the world population is approximately 90 million people. This is the largest absolute level of population growth ever recorded. According to the most recent population projections of the United Nations, the world population will probably double again before stabilising at a stationary level. Ninety percent of the present and future population growth is accounted for by developing countries.
The fast increase in the size of the population...

In 1971, the Dutch-language branch of the Population and Family Study Centre (CBGS)* of the Department of Public Health and the Family organized, in collaboration with investigators from the Rijksuniversiteit Gent, the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and the Vrije Universiteit Brussels, the Second National Fertility Survey in Belgium (NEGO 11)** (Cliquet et al. , 1970). NEGO II was a result of and related to the First National Fertility Survey performed in Belgium (NEGO I) in 1966 (Cliquet, 1967; Morsa, 1967). Both of these surveys were modelled on the Growth of American Families (GAF)...

Since 1972 there has been a close contact through their pUblications between the Netherlands Interuniversity Demographic Institute at The Hague and the Population and Family Study Centre at Brussels. This co-operation has resulted in the joint pUblication of the journal BevoLking en Gezin (Population and Family) in the Dutch language. However, there has been a need for wider circulation of the Dutch language studies and research in the field of population and the family. In particular it was thought necessary to make possible an exchange of ideas and findings with population and family...