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.     

Can Increased Educational Attainment Among Lower-Educated Mothers Reduce Inequalities in Children’s Skill Development?

A rich tradition of stratification research has established a robust link between mothers’ education and the skills in children that forecast children’s own mobility. Yet, this research has failed to consider that many U.S. women are now completing their education after having children. Such a trend raises questions about whether increases in mothers’ educational attainment can improve their children’s skill development and whether these gains are enough to reduce inequalities in skills compared with children whose mothers completed the same degree before they were born. To answer these questions, we draw on a nationally representative sample of mothers and children participating in the National Longitudinal Surveys (NLSY79 and CNLY), random- and fixed-effects techniques, and repeated measures of children’s cognitive and noncognitive skills. Contrary to existing research and theory, our results reveal that educational attainment obtained after children’s births is not associated with an improvement in children’s skills. Such findings offer substantial refinement to a long-standing model of intergenerational mobility by suggesting that the intergenerational returns to mother’s education are weaker when education is acquired after children are born. Results also highlight the limits of two-generation policy approaches to reducing inequality in future generations.     

Educational Differences in Completed Fertility: A Behavioral Genetic Study of Finnish Male and Female Twins

Despite the large body of research on educational differences in fertility, how genetic and environmental influences may contribute to educational differences in completed fertility is not well understood. This study examines the association between educational level and completed fertility in a sample of Finnish male and female twins born between 1950 and 1957 with register-based fertility follow-up until 2009. The results show that poorly educated men and highly educated women are least likely to have any children and have lower completed fertility in general. Behavioral genetics analysis suggests that the association between education and having any children in both sexes is influenced by factors shared by co-twins and that these factors are genetic rather than common environmental. No evidence of a causal pathway between education and having any children independent of these shared influences is found. These findings suggest that familial factors may play a role in the process through which educational differences in completed fertility are formed.     

Childbearing Behavior Before and After the 1994 Population Policies in Ghana

Due to the high population growth rate in the mid-20th century, the government of Ghana introduced population policies to reduce the growth rate. Encouraging girls’ education and increasing contraceptive use were the two main policy measures to reduce population growth. In order to get a clear picture of the childbearing dynamics of Ghanaian women in response to the population policy of 1994, we analyzed individual reproductive histories from 1969 to 2003 using 2003 Ghana Demographic Health survey data to disentangle patterns by parity, calendar period, and educational groups. Exponential hazard regression models were used to estimate the relative risk of births. We find some evidence of a critical juncture in fertility trends, particularly for the fifth child. In addition, higher parity transition rates continuously declined for women with secondary or higher education and these educational levels were achieved by a higher share of the population after the policy was implemented. The 1994 population policy was successful if only by virtue of the increasing number of women with secondary or higher education. Belonging to this group is not only associated with lower fertility, but this suppressing effect strengthened in the years following the policy implementation. We also suspect that the increasing similarity between women with no education and with primary education reflects the diffusion of contraceptive knowledge and norms related to childbearing. The educational reform and contraceptive initiatives did result in increased education and contraceptive awareness and are therefore beneficial programs.     

Parental investment responses to a low birth weight outcome: who compensates and who reinforces?

This study analyzes how parental investment responds to a low birth weight (LBW) outcome and finds important differences in investment responses by maternal education. High school dropouts reinforce a LBW outcome by providing less investment in the human capital of their LBW children relative to their normal birth weight children whereas higher educated mothers compensate by investing more in their LBW children. In addition, an increase in the number of LBW siblings present in the home raises investment in a child, which is consistent with reinforcement, but this positive effect tends to be concentrated among high school dropouts. These results suggest that studies analyzing the effects of LBW on child outcomes that do not account for heterogeneity in investment responses to a LBW outcome by maternal education may overestimate effects of LBW on child outcomes for those born to low-educated mothers and underestimate such effects for those born to high-educated mothers.     

Bargaining over family size: The determinants of fertility in Brazil

Understanding how households make fertility decisions is important to implementing effective policy to slow population growth. Most empirical studies of this decision are based on household models in which men and women are assumed to act as if they have the same preferences for the number of children. However, if men and women have different preferences regarding fertility and are more likely to assert their own preferences as their bargaining power in the household increases, policies to lower fertility rates may be more effectively targeted toward one spouse or the other. In this paper, we test the relevance of the single preferences model by investigating whether men and women's nonwage incomes have the same effects on the number of children in the household. We find that while increases in both the man and woman's nonwage income lower the number of children in the household, an equivalent increase in the woman's income has a significantly stronger effect than the man's. In addition, we find that increases in women's nonwage transfer income have the strongest effects on the fertility decisions of women with low levels of education. The most important policy implication of our results is that policies aimed at increasing the incomes of the least-educated women will be the most effective in lowering fertility rates.     

Impact of educational attainments on women's fertility]

The fertility rates of Chinese women of different educational backgrounds and ages were studied. The results indicate that women with higher educational backgrounds are likely to marry later in life, and have fewer children. The converse is also true; women with little or no education marry very young and have significantly more offspring. It is noted that many of the poory educated are traditionally conservative; they strongly desire at least 1 male offspring, and generally understand the least about matters related to family planning. In terms of economics and human investment, intellectuals are less likely to want more than 1 child. 2 of the most effective ways in which fertility rates may be lowered are to reduce early fertility and to improve the educational levels of women.     

The change of fertility and factors impacting it in Shanghai City in the past thirty years]

In 1981 a 3% random sampling of women born between 1931-66 was taken in Shanghai to study their menstrual and marital histories, pregnancies, contraceptive use, education, and occupation. In the last 30 years the fertility rate and the rate of natural population increase began to decline beginning around 1957-58. The changes in fertility rate fall into 3 periods: 1) between 1958-61 the fertility rate fell from 238.6/1000 to 159.2/1000, averaging 26.5/1000 annually; there was a slight period of stability from 1961-63; 2) between 1963-67 it fell from 155.8/1000 to 56.3/000, averaging 24.9/1000 annually and between 1967-68 there was a slight increase; and 3) between 1968-74 it fell from 63.2/100 to 26.4/1000, averaging 6.1/1000 annually. The fertility rate of various age groups also declined during the last 30 years. The average number of children for married women was 1.92. Factors influencing the fertility rate include: 1) birth control policy: the changes in the fertility rates were dominated by the birth control policy; for instance, from 1956-60, after late marriages were officially advocated, the average age at 1st marriage for men was 1.64 years older than before; between 1962-64, those women with more than 3 children were sterilized. 2) Education: the higher the educational attainment, the later was the age at 1st marriage, the more effective was the use of contraceptives and the lower the standard was for fertility; 3) occupation: the type of job influenced the age at marriage, as well as the frequency of miscarriage and live births; 4) attitude towards children: the total number of children women reported they would like averaged out to be 1.7; 5) urban and rural differences: the fertility rate for Shanghai City was not only lower than for Shanghai County, it fell at a faster rate; 6) changes in the age structure of fertile women affected the fertility rate; and 7) others: nutrition, the ability to propagate, age at 1st marriage, plus economic and social factors all affected fertility.     

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.     

The Optimal Trade-Off Between Quality and Quantity with Unknown Number of Survivors

In a model of endogenous fertility where individuals know the probability of child survival but not the final number of survivors, parents do not always formulate a precautionary demand for children. For some utility functions, parents have fewer children than what they would have in a situation in which the number of survivors is known earlier. The properties of the optimal economic policy depend on the degree to which the social welfare function takes ignorance into account. If social welfare is evaluated after parents know how many children survived, the parental response to uncertainty is socially inefficient. Individual decisions then should be corrected through tax or transfer on both births and education. This property helps determine the optimal public response to mortality crisis in the presence of educational externalities.     

How Do Education and Family Planning Accelerate Fertility Decline?

Education and family planning can both be influenced by policy and are thought to accelerate fertility decline. However, questions remain about the nature of these effects. Does the effect of education operate through increasing educational attainment of women or educational enrollment of children? At which educational level is the effect strongest? Does the effect of family planning operate through increasing contraceptive prevalence or reducing unmet need? Is education or family planning more important? We assessed the quantitative impact of education and family planning in high-fertility settings using a regression framework inspired by Granger causality. We found that women's attainment of lower secondary education is key to accelerating fertility decline and found an accelerating effect of contraceptive prevalence for modern methods. We found the impact of contraceptive prevalence to be substantially larger than that of education. These accelerating effects hold in sub-Saharan Africa, but with smaller effect sizes there than elsewhere.     

Education Gains Attributable to Fertility Decline: Patterns by Gender,Period, and Country in Latin America and Asia

We investigate the heterogeneity across countries and time in the relationship between mother’s fertility and children’s educational attainment—the quantity-quality (Q-Q) trade-off—by using census data from 17 countries in Asia and Latin America, with data from each country spanning multiple census years. For each country-year, we estimate micro-level instrumental variables models predicting secondary school attainment using number of siblings of the child, instrumented by the sex composition of the first two births in the family. We then analyze correlates of Q-Q trade-off patterns across countries. On average, one additional sibling in the family reduces the probability of secondary education by 6 percentage points for girls and 4 percentage points for boys. This Q-Q trade-off is significantly associated with the level of son preference, slightly decreasing over time and with fertility, but it does not significantly differ by educational level of the country.     

Intensive Parenting: Fertility and Breastfeeding Duration in the United States

Using 30 years of longitudinal data from a nationally representative cohort of women, we study the association between breastfeeding duration and completed fertility, fertility expectations, and birth spacing. We find that women who breastfeed their first child for five months or longer are a distinct group. They have more children overall and higher odds of having three or more children rather than two, compared with women who breastfeed for shorter durations or not at all. Expected fertility is associated with initiating breastfeeding but not with how long mothers breastfeed. Thus, women who breastfeed longer do not differ significantly from other breastfeeding women in their early fertility expectations. Rather, across the life course, these women achieve and even exceed their earlier fertility expectations. Women who breastfeed for shorter durations (1–21 weeks) are more likely to fall short of their expected fertility than to achieve or exceed their expectations, and they are significantly less likely than women who breastfeed for longer durations (≥22 weeks) to exceed their expected fertility. In contrast, women who breastfeed longer are as likely to exceed as to achieve their earlier expectations, and the difference between their probability of falling short versus exceeding their fertility expectations is relatively small and at the boundary of statistical significance (p = .096). These differences in fertility are not explained by differences in personal and family resources, including family income or labor market attachment. Our findings suggest that breastfeeding duration may serve as a proxy for identifying a distinct approach to parenting. Women who breastfeed longer have reproductive patterns quite different than their socioeconomic position would predict. They both have more children and invest more time in those children.     

Economic and Institutional Context and Second Births in Seven European Countries

The extent to which mothers progress to a second child varies greatly between European countries. Although both institutional and economic context are believed to be partly responsible for these differences, available research on economic conditions and fertility mostly focuses on first births and studies on family policy and fertility have hitherto insufficiently addressed population heterogeneity. Combining longitudinal microdata from the Harmonized Histories with contextual data on labour market uncertainty and family policy, this paper uses discrete-time hazard models to analyse the impact of economic and institutional context on second birth hazards of 22,298 women in 7 European countries between 1970 and 2002. Particular attention is paid to variation in the contextual effects by level of education. We find that aggregate-level unemployment and temporary employment reduce second birth hazards, particularly for low- and medium-level educated women. Family policies are positively related to second birth hazards. Whereas family allowances stimulate second births particularly among low educated mothers, the positive effect of childcare is invariant by level of education.     

Nonmarital Childbearing in Russia: Second Demographic Transition or Pattern of Disadvantage?

Using retrospective union, birth, and education histories that span 1980–2003, this study investigates nonmarital childbearing in contemporary Russia. We employ a combination of methods to decompose fertility rates by union status and analyze the processes that lead to a nonmarital birth. We find that the increase in the percentage of nonmarital births was driven mainly by the growing proportion of women who cohabit before conception, not changing fertility behavior of cohabitors or changes in union behavior after conception. The relationship between education and nonmarital childbearing has remained stable: the least-educated women have the highest birth rates within cohabitation and as single mothers, primarily because of their lower probability of legitimating a nonmarital conception. These findings suggest that nonmarital childbearing Russia has more in common with the pattern of disadvantage in the United States than with the second demographic transition. We also find several aspects of nonmarital childbearing that neither of these perspectives anticipates.     

Migration and fertility in the Philippines: Hendershot's selectivity model revisited

A demographer compared 1983 data on 5092 currently married migrant and nonmigrant women living in the Philippines to determine whether migration was still selective in terms of fertility behavior or not. Fertility was basically the same between migrant and nonmigrant women in their early reproductive years, but clear differences existed between older migrants and nonmigrants as indicated by children ever born (CEB). In fact, migration did not significantly affect cumulative fertility at all (correlation ratio=.03). Moreover its effect was further reduced when the researchers controlled for age and duration of marriage. Besides level of education and contraceptive use status contributed more to explanations of fertility differentials (correlation ratio=.09 for both) than did migration. The mean number of CEB adjusted for all variables fell with level of education from 4.18 for those with primary education to 3.63 to those with college education. This result identified education as a means to reduce high fertility in the Philippines. On the other hand, the mean was higher among women who ever used contraception than it was for those who never used it (4.21 vs. 3.72). Apparently considerable family size motivated mothers to use contraception. Since women who migrated to cities tended to be in the beginning of their reproductive period, considerable natural increase could occur in urban areas. Therefore the Philippines needed to devise a strategy for reducing fertility among migrant women as well as strategies for other groups such as professional/career oriented women and women who remained at home to tend to children and/or the home.     

The role of intergenerational transfers,land, and education in fertility transition in rural Kenya: the case of Nyeri district

This qualitative study reveals how population pressures, land availability, inheritance norms, and educational opportunities intertwine to influence fertility decline in rural Kenya. Focus group discussions with men and women whose childbearing occurred both before and after the onset of rapid, unexpected fertility transition in Nyeri, Kenya allowed individuals who actually participated in, or witnessed, the fertility transition to “voice” their perceptions as to the mechanisms underlying the transition. Findings suggest that, since land inheritance is a cultural norm, land scarcity and diminishing farm size often influence fertility decision-making and behavior via preferences for fewer children. Further, education does not appear to be the driving cause of fertility behavior change, but rather is adopted as a substitute for land inheritance when land resources are scarce. These findings have implications for our understanding of fertility behavior as well as for improving predictions of fertility transition in other rural sub-Saharan African contexts.     

How Far Has Fertility in China Really Declined?

According to births in the last year as reported in China's 2000 census, the total fertility rate (TFR) in the year 2000 in China was 1.22 children per woman. This estimate is widely considered to be too low, primarily because some women who had out‐of‐quota births according to China's one‐child family policy did not report those births to the census enumerator. Analysis of fertility trends derived by applying the own‐children method of fertility estimation to China's 1990 and 2000 censuses indicates that the true level of the TFR in 2000 was probably between 1.5 and 1.6 children per woman. A decomposition analysis of change in the TFR between 1990 and 2000, based on our best estimate of 1.59 for the TFR in 2000, indicates that about two‐fifths of the decline in the conventional TFR between 1990 and 2000 is accounted for by later marriage and less marriage, and three‐fifths by declining fertility within marriage. The analysis also applies the birth history reconstruction method of fertility estimation to the two censuses, yielding an alternative set of fertility estimates that are compared with the set derived by the own‐children method. The analysis also includes estimates of trends in fertility by urban/rural residence, education, ethnicity, and migration status. Over time, fertility has declined sharply within all categories of these characteristics, indicating that the one‐child policy has had large across‐the‐board effects.