Women's autonomy,women's status and fertility-related behavior in Zimbabwe

Women's household decision-making autonomy is a potentially important but less studied indicator of women's ability to control their fertility. Using a DHS sample of 3,701 married black African women from Zimbabwe, I look at women who have no say in major purchases, whether they should work outside the home,and the number of children. When men dominated all household decisions, women were less likely to approve of contraceptive use, discuss their desired number of children with their spouse, report ever use of a modern method of contraception, and to intend to use contraception in the future. However, women's decision-making autonomy was not associated with current modern contraceptive use. Women who had no decision-making autonomy had 0.26 more children than women who had some autonomy. These autonomy measures provide additional independent explanatory power of fertility-related behavior net of traditional measures of women's status such as education and labor force participation.     

The sectoral labor supply of married couples in Brazil: Testing the unitary model of household behavior

An assumption of the unitary model of household decision-making is that household members maximize one household utility function. This assumption implies that households pool their income and, therefore, the ownership of nonwage income has no effect on household demand. In this paper, this implication is tested by estimating multi-sector labor supply equations for men and women in Brazil. The results indicate that the unitary model is rejected in the informal and self-employment sectors for men and the formal and informal sectors for women; in these cases own nonwage income has a significantly negative effect on labor supply while spousal nonwage income has no significant effect. Received: 29 December 1997/Accepted: 9 December 1998     

The state and structural vulnerability: Policy egalitarianism and household income

The distribution of household income in the United States is remarkably unequal. Stratification researchers predict levels of income in terms of individual characteristics and structural features of the economy and society. These researchers, however, often neglect the role of the state. Political sociologists have begun to examine the impact of the state on aggregate levels of inequality across nations. I build on this literature to explain household income in the United States. Utilizing 2000 IPUMS data, I clarify how household income varies across the sub-national U.S. states according to policy configurations. I find that sub-national states with more egalitarian policies help to buttress the relative incomes of groups vulnerable to low incomes, particularly service workers and single mother families. These results suggest that studies of income and income inequality should consider the role of policies.     

How female education affects reproductive behavior in urban Pakistan

Although Pakistan remains in a pretransitional stage (contraceptive prevalence of only 11.9% among married women in 1992), urban women with post-primary levels of education are spearheading the gradual move toward fertility transition. Data collected in the city of Karachi in 1987 were used to determine whether the inverse association between fertility and female education is attributable to child supply variables, demand factors, or fertility regulation costs. Karachi, with its high concentration of women with secondary educations employed in professional occupations, has a contraceptive prevalence rate of 31%. Among women married for less than 20 years, a 10-year increment in education predicts that a woman will average two-fifths of a child less than other women in the previous 5 years. Regression analysis identified 4 significant intervening variables in the education-fertility relationship: marriage duration, net family income, formal sector employment, and age at first marriage. Education appears to affect fertility because it promotes a later age at marriage and thus reduces life-time exposure to the risk of childbearing, induces women to marry men with higher incomes (a phenomenon that either reduces the cost of fertility regulation or the demand for children), leads women to become employed in the formal sector (leading to a reduction in the demand for children), and has other unspecified effects on women's values or opportunities that are captured by their birth cohort. When these intervening variables are held constant, women's attitude toward family planning loses its impact on fertility, as do women's domestic autonomy and their expectations of self-support in old age. These findings lend support to increased investments in female education in urban Pakistan as a means of limiting the childbearing of married women. Although it is not clear if investment in female education would have the same effect in rural Pakistan, such action is important from a human and economic development perspective.     

禀赋、场域与中国妇女生育意愿研究

利用2006年中国健康营养调查(CHNS)数据,构建模型,对中国18～52岁妇女的意愿生育决策、生育强度及其影响因素进行实证分析。在众多因素中,家庭已有孩子构成、能力禀赋、资本禀赋对妇女生育意愿有着显著影响,技术禀赋对妇女再生育的意愿和强度有重要影响。同时,将划分生育场域边界的地区变量纳入模型,显示不同区域间妇女的生育意愿存在较大差别,中西部地区妇女的生育意愿明显高于东北部地区;妇女禀赋条件越改善、禀赋水平越高、生育场域越优化,其生育意愿、生育强度越低,生育行为越趋理性。未来开展人口和计划生育工作,制定、调整人口和计划生育政策,应该对此予以充分考虑。     

U.S. women at work

Women made up 43% of the U.S. labor force in 1980, up from 29% in 1950, and 52% of all women 16 and over were working or looking for work compared to 34% in 1950. The surge in women's employment is linked to more delayed marriage, divorce, and separation, women's increased education, lower fertility, rapid growth in clerical and service jobs, inflation, and changing attitudes toward "woman's place." Employment has risen fastest among married women, especially married mothers of children under 6, 45% of whom are now in the labor force. Some 44% of employed women now work fulltime the year round, but still average only $6 for every $10 earned by men working that amount. This is partly because most women remain segregated in low paying "women's jobs" with few chances for advancement. Among fulltime workers, women college graduates earn less than male high school dropouts. Working wives were still spending 6 times more time on housework than married men in 1975 and working mothers of preschool children are also hampered by a severe lack of daycare facilities. Children of working women, however, appear to develop normally. Equal employment opportunity and affirmative action measures have improved the climate for working women but not as much as for minorities. The federal income tax and social security systems still discriminate against 2 income families. Woman's position in the U.S. labor force should eventually improve with the inroads women are making in some male-dominated occupations and gains in job experience and seniority among younger women who now tend to stay in the labor force through the years of childbearing and early childrearing, unlike women in the 1950s and 1960s.     

Risk preferences and the timing of marriage and childbearing

The existing literature on marriage and fertility decisions pays little attention to the roles played by risk preferences and uncertainty. However given uncertainty regarding the availability of suitable marriage partners, the ability to contracept, and the ability to conceive, women's risk preferences might be expected to play an important role in marriage and fertility timing decisions. By using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), I find that measured risk preferences have a significant effect on the timing of both marriage and fertility. Highly risk-tolerant women are more likely to delay marriage, consistent with either a search model of marriage or a risk-pooling explanation. In addition, risk preferences affect fertility timing in a way that differs by marital status and education, and that varies over the life cycle. Greater tolerance for risk leads to earlier births at young ages, consistent with these women being less likely to contracept effectively. In addition, as the subgroup of college-educated, unmarried women nears the end of their fertile periods, highly risk-tolerant women are likely to delay childbearing relative to their more risk-averse counterparts and are therefore less likely to become mothers. These findings may have broader implications for both individual and societal well-being.     

The determinants and patterns of married women's labor force participation in Korea

The present study investigates the determinants and patterns of married women's labor force participation in Korea. Married women's employment in Korea is largely determined by age, urban residence, household characteristics of the husband's socioeconomic status, family income, fertility, and the lagged effect of work. Older age, rural residence, inferior household economic condition, and recent work experience are the major positive causes of married women's participation in the market work. On the other hand, younger women with preschool children, who currently reside in urban areas, enjoying better household economic conditions (due to higher socioeconomic status of husbands and/or higher family income) are the groups of women with the smallest probability of working in the market. Married women's employment pattern in Korea shows a pattern typical of less-developed and low-income countries in two aspects: married women working and characterized by a low level of education; the difference between urban and rural areas in terms of work participation pattern is remarkable. Although Korea belongs to the advanced group of currently industrializing countries, she lags behind with other developing countries in terms of married women's employment. Moreover, it is difficult to predict in advance that Korea would have similar experiences as those of contemporary advanced countries.     

Natural resource collection and desired family size: a longitudinal test of environment-population theories

Theories relating the changing environment to human fertility predict that declining natural resources may actually increase the demand for children. Unfortunately, most previous empirical studies have been limited to cross-sectional designs that limit our ability to understand links between processes that change over time. We take advantage of longitudinal measurement spanning more than a decade of change in the natural environment, household agricultural behaviors, and individual fertility preferences to reexamine this question. Using fixed effect models, we find that women experiencing increasing time required to collect firewood to heat and cook or fodder to feed animals (the dominant needs for natural resources in this setting) increased their desired family size, even as many other macro-level changes have reduced desired family size. In contrast to previous, cross-sectional studies, we find no evidence of such a relationship for men. Our findings regarding time spent collecting firewood are also new. These results support the “vicious circle” perspective and economic theories of fertility pointing to the value of children for household labor. This feedback from natural resource constraint to increased fertility is an important mechanism for understanding long-term environmental change.     

Effects of education on reproductive behavior: lessons from Pakistan

Evidence from the Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey 1990/91 (PDHS) and a 1987 study by Zeba A. Sathar and Karen Oppenheim on women's fertility in Karachi and the impact of educational status, corroborates the correlation between improved education for women and fertility decline. PDHS revealed that current fertility is 5.4 children/ever married woman by the end of the reproductive period. 12% currently use a contraceptive method compared to 49% in India, 40% in Bangladesh, and 62% in Sri Lanka. The social environment of high illiteracy, low educational attainment, poverty, high infant and child and maternal mortality, son preference, and low status of women leads to high fertility. Fertility rates vary by educational status; i.e., women with no formal education have 2 more children than women with at least some secondary education. Education also affects infant and child mortality and morbidity. Literacy is 31% for women and 43% for men. 30% of all males and 20% of all females have attended primary school. Although most women know at least 1 contraceptive method, it is the urban educated woman who is twice as likely to know a source of supply and 5 times more likely to be a user. The Karachi study found that lower fertility among better educated urban women is an unintended consequence of women's schooling and deliberate effort to limit the number of children they have. Education-related fertility differentials could not be explained by the length of time women are at risk of becoming pregnant (late marriage age). Fertility limitation may be motivated by the predominant involvement in the formal work force and higher income. The policy implications are the increasing female schooling is a good investment in lowering fertility; broader improvements also need to be made in economic opportunities for women, particularly in the formal sector. Other needs are for increasing availability and accessibility of contraceptive and family planning services and increasing availability and accessibility of contraceptive and family planning services and increasing knowledge of contraception. The investment will impact development and demography and is an adjunct to child health an survival.     

亚洲女性收入对生育率影响的国际比较研究--基于劳动参与率、受教育程度、就业方式的视角

通过构建家庭效用函数模型,论证了家庭收入增长中女性收入对家庭生育决策的影响,说明了随着女性收入的提高,会降低生育率。进一步,通过引用女性劳动参与率、受教育程度及就业方式作为女性收入对生育率影响的中间变量,再运用相关数据进行实证分析,发现女性劳动参与率、受教育程度对生育率有着负向的影响,而女性非全日制就业方式对生育率有着正向的影响。再进一步,对亚洲各国生育政策的调整进行国际比较,探讨生育政策的具体措施与影响女性收入的三个因素之间的关系,最后针对中国目前的生育水平提出两方面的建议：硬政策的完善和软环境的支持,以有助于提高人口素质,优化人口结构。     

Fertility trends in rural Hebei Province,People's Republic of China

Background: The People's Republic of China (PRC) has conducted several different population policies since its establishment. Although fertility has declined dramatically in the past three decades, the degree to which this was the result of the different population policies is still under debate. Purpose: We attempt to evaluate the effect of the different formal population policies conducted in the PRC by looking at the fertility behavior of rural women. Unlike urban women, rural women experienced less social control (in the absence of a work unit) and received fewer benefits from adhering to the one-child policy. Data: The data analyzed were collected from a stratified sample of households from 288 villages in 9 counties of Hebei Province, PRC, between 1996 and 1999. The number of children ever born was reported by 4,168 ever-married women aged 25 and over who had had at least one birth. Findings: Our analysis indicates that the formal population policies of the PRC had little effect on the number of children ever born to rural women in Hebei. These retrospective data, by cohort, indicate consistently declining fertility since the revolution (1949). Limited child bearing was associated with age and the level of education. Controlling for the effect of age and education, women born after 1960, at whom the one-child policy was directed, actually had more children than older women. Conclusions: The Chinese fertility decline, at least as reflected in the experience of rural women in Hebei Province, derived mainly from secular changes in women's access to education and other social resources rather than from the direct effects of population policies.     

The effects of income level,income distribution,education and urbanization on fertility rates among 28 administrative regions of China

Conflicting empirical evidence on the role of income distribution on fertility rates is the impetus for this 1982 study of providence-specific Chinese Census data, excluding Tibet. The findings support the prior thesis of Repetto but utilize the micromethods and per household income measures of the competing findings of Boulier. It is cautioned that in the Chinese analysis equal income distribution depresses fertility, but China may not reflect world wide patterns. China did not have until recently a market incentive system, and there are income measurement problems. The data are per capita economic output not per capita income, and those high output areas which did not produce low fertility may actually have had households with low incomes. The importance of this research is in establishing that cross-province data are a useful tool in understanding the influence of income distribution on fertility. As with most developing countries, women's education, for instance, at least junior high education explained the largest variation of fertility differences among the 28 provinces. The urbanization variable when controlling for income was positive, unlike the other developing countries. The 1949 Chinese government's spatial industrial policy encouraged urbanization and industrialization in rural areas and family planning programs such that highly urbanized provinces have low population density. A variety of variables on income level, income distribution, education, and urbanization are discussed. OLSQ regressions were generated utilizing such independent variables as output per capita in yuan (YOUTHPC80), the square of YOUTHPC80 (YOUTHPC802), YOUTHPC80 multiplied by the average family size in each province (YOUTHPH80), and the squared value of YOUTHPH80.     

External Shocks,Household Consumption and Fertility in Indonesia

This paper examines the impact of idiosyncratic income shocks on household consumption, educational expenditure and fertility in Indonesia, and assesses whether the investment in human capital of children and fertility are used to smooth household consumption. Using four different kinds of self-reported economic hardships, our findings indicate that coping mechanisms are rather efficient for Indonesian households that perceive an economic hardship. Only in case of unemployment do we find a significant decrease in consumption spending and educational expenditure while fertility increases. These results indicate that households that perceive an unemployment shock use children as a means for smoothing consumption. Regarding the death of a household member or natural disaster we find that consumption per person even increases. These results are consistent with the argument that coping mechanisms even over-compensate the actual consumption loss due to an economic hardship. One important lesson from our findings is that different types of income shock may lead to different economic and demographic behavioral adjustments and therefore require specific targeted social insurance programs.     

Peers and Fertility Preferences: An Empirical Investigation of the Role of Neighbours,Religion and Education

Individual fertility preference is influenced by observed social norms. The present paper investigates the effect of the observed fertility of peers on a woman’s fertility preference. We explore the role of two peer groups: neighbourhood peers and religious peers. Data from the National Family Health Surveys (1992–1993, 1998–1999 and 2005–2006) in India is employed for empirical estimations using a multinomial logit model. We find that both neighbourhood and religious peers have a significant impact on individual fertility preferences, but their relative importance changes with family size. An increase in peer fertility increases the probability of preferring more children. We further examine the roles of education and wealth as transmission channels between the fertility norms of peers to the fertility preferences of the women and find that education plays an important role in moderating peer influences. These findings can serve as vital inputs in formulating family planning and gender policies.     

Household composition choices of older unmarried women

This article extends previous research on the household composition of older unmarried women, using a statistical model that treats each of a woman's surviving children as a distinct potential provider of a shared household. Additional possibilities--living alone, living with other nuclear-family relatives, and living with others--are also recognized, providing a varied range of household-structure opportunities for older women. The approach allows us to identify individual child attributes associated with the propensity to coreside with the older unmarried mother. The results confirm earlier findings regarding the importance of income, age, and disability status as determinants of the household composition of older women. We find, however, that unmarried children, especially sons, are more likely to share a household with an elderly mother than are married children. Working reduces the likelihood that a married daughter will live with her older mother. Overall, the findings suggest that the attributes, more so than the sheer numbers, of living children influence the household structure of their mothers.     

Costs and benefits of children: implications for population policy

Family size preferences are strongly affected by parents' perceptions of the value, economic contributions, and costs of children. Better understanding of these factors can help policy-makers to improve the effectiveness of population IEC campaigns, design strategies to persuade couples to have smaller families, assess the relationship between economic development and family size preferences, and devise national population policies and family planning programs that reflect individual choices. Parents in high-fertility countries are more likely to perceive children as productive investments than those in low-fertility countries. Parents in the former countries maintain children are an economic advantage or provide practical assistance in the household; they are less likely to emphasize the psychological advantages of children. As economic development occurs, and parents no longer value children for their economic contributions, psychological and social reasons become more important. Changing fertility preferences is more complex than providing couples with family planning services. Similarly, efforts to persuade families that large families are a burden are successful only when families are already interested in reducing their family size. Efforts to persuade couples to have smaller families are likely to be more successful if there are alternative sources of old-age support available, for example, from increased household savings, public or private pensions, or greater contributions from 1st and 2nd children. Investments in education and training, especially for women and children, would also support these goals.     

Fertility and endogenous gender bargaining power

We develop an intra-household bargaining model to examine the feedback effect of household fertility decisions on gender bargaining power. In our model, the household balance of power is endogenously determined reflecting social interactions, i.e., the fertility choices by the other couples in society. We show the presence of multiple equilibria in fertility outcome: one equilibrium characterized by patriarchal society with a high fertility rate, and another in which women are sufficiently empowered and the fertility rate is low. In other circumstances, this study also demonstrates a positive relationship between female wage rates and the fertility outcomes. Finally, we discuss its policy implications, comparing the effects of two family policies: the child allowance and the subsidies for market childcare.