Women's power and fertility transition: The cases of Africa and the West Indies

Over the last three decades, fertility has fallen dramatically throughout the West Indies (close to or below replacement-level on some islands). With few exceptions, fertility has risen or has remained at high levels in Africa. The difference is that Caribbean women have been empowered to pursue goals independently of their childbearing capacity, and African women have not. African fertility can be expected to decline, as it appears it may have begun in a small number of countries, where, when, and to the extent that African women come to enjoy economic mobility opportunities like those which have been available to their Caribbean peers.This paper reports findings from research supported by NSF Grants #BNS 8507605, 8520445, and 8804719 and one REU supplemental grant. I am most grateful for this support. But the views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of NSF. Caroline Bledsoe, Candice Bradley, and Etienne van de Walle deserve thanks for guiding me to the best of the recent literature on African demography, but no blame for what I did not find.     

The economic commission for Asia and the Far East program to assist fertility control

Demography - In conclusion, the ECAFE program to assist fertility control is vigorous and expanding. For demographers, this program, and especially the meetings of the technical groups, should have...     

The spread of primary schooling in Sub-Saharan Africa: implications for fertility change

In 1980 Caldwell hypothesized that the time of the onset of the fertility transition in developing countries would be linked with the achievement of “mass formal schooling.” This article applies Demographic and Health Survey data to assess schooling patterns and trends for 23 sub‐Saharan African countries, using the percentage of 15–19‐year olds who have completed at least four years of schooling as an indicator of progress in education. As background to that assessment, the article includes a review of the sparse literature on the links between children's schooling and fertility decline. The analysis strongly supports Caldwell's hypothesis with empirical evidence of the much stronger negative relationship between fertility decline and grade 4 attainment in those countries that have attained mass‐schooling levels than in those that have not yet achieved such levels.     

New estimates of fertility and child mortality in Africa, south of the Sahara

Summary Earlier work by Page and Coale has estimated demographic indices of fertility and mortality for parts of Africa using the Sullivan modification of Brass's technique. The present paper presents modified and more accurate estimates of fertility and child mortality, not only for the sub-national units covered by Page and Coale but also for areas not covered by them. The present analysis which employs Trussell's refinement of Brass and Sullivan's techniques also includes improvements overlooked in earlier estimates. The salient finding that emerges is that while the Brass mortality technique is very powerful, his equally ingenious fertility technique is very weak and should not be relied on for estimating fertility parameters.     

Unconditional government social cash transfer in Africa does not increase fertility

Among policymakers, a common perception surrounding the effects of cash transfer programmes, particularly unconditional programmes targeted to families with children, is that they induce increased fertility. We evaluate the Zambian Child Grant Programme, a government unconditional cash transfer targeted to families with a child under the age of 5 and examine impacts on fertility and household composition. The evaluation was a cluster randomized control trial, with data collected over 4 years from 2010 to 2014. Our results indicate that there are no programme impacts on overall fertility. Our results contribute to a small evidence base demonstrating that there are no unintended incentives related to fertility due to cash transfers.     

HIV and fertility in Africa: first evidence from population-based surveys

The historical pattern of the demographic transition suggests that fertility declines follow mortality declines, followed by a rise in human capital accumulation and economic growth. The HIV/AIDS epidemic threatens to reverse this path. We utilize recent rounds of the demographic and health surveys that link an individual woman’s fertility outcomes to her HIV status based on testing. The data allow us to distinguish the effect of own positive HIV status on fertility (which may be due to lower fecundity and other physiological reasons) from the behavioral response to higher mortality risk, as measured by the local community HIV prevalence. We show that although HIV-infected women have significantly lower fertility, local community HIV prevalence has no significant effect on noninfected women’s fertility.     

Persistence of high fertility in tropical Africa: the case of the Democratic Republic of the Congo

The article explores how geography, history, and society have shaped childbearing behaviors over the last half-century, and how they are now being reshaped by modernity and the exigencies of urban life, in the democratic Republic of the Congo. The decline of prolonged postpartum abstinence and involuntary childlessness initially raised fertility to high levels (6–7 children per woman). More recently, socioeconomic differentials in fertility have emerged, suggesting that the country may be entering a phase of fertility decline. A full-blown transition, however, seems still a remote prospect. Supported both by cultural traditions and by economic rationality, Congo's people remain largely convinced of the benefits of many children for their own and their kin's security. While an eventual fertility transition may be taken for granted, the article examines the many hurdles, contradictions, and tensions that will have to be overcome to achieve that outcome.     

Uncovering the impact of the HIV epidemic on fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa: the case of Malawi

We evaluate the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on the reproductive behaviour for all women in Malawi, HIV-negative and HIV-positive alike, allowing for heterogeneous response depending on age and prior number of births. HIV/AIDS increases the probability that a young woman gives birth to her first child, while it decreases the probability to give birth of older women and of women who have already given birth. The resulting change in the distribution of fertility across age groups is likely to be more demographically and economically important than changes in the total number of children a woman gives birth to.     

The changing fertility of the Japanese

The Japan of the middle of the nineteenth century was a backward agrarian state of perhaps 35 million people. Three-quarters of a century later, the 75 million people of an industrialized and urbanized Japan had challenged the industrial and military power of the West itself in a daring attempt to achieve economic and political control over eastern Asia and the islands of Oceania. Population growth had stimulated economic and political expansion, but in 1940 when the Planning Board of the Cabinet reported to the Imperial Japanese Government that the country would need perhaps 200 million people to maintain the hegemony of the East, population growth was already slowing. Japanese projections of the trends of the interwar period indicated that the maximum population would be reached by the end of the twentieth century, and that it would be slightly less than 125 million.²     

Education and fertility in sub-Saharan africa: Individual and community effects

Using data from Demographic and Health Surveys for 22 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, I show that the average educational level in a village or a community of a similar size has a significant depressing effect on a woman's birth rates, net of urbanization and her own education. According to simulations, average fertility for these countries would be 1.00 lower if education were expanded from the current level in the region to the relatively high level in Kenya. The exclusion of aggregate education from the model leaves a response of only 0.52. A considerable aggregate contribution is estimated even when several potential determinants of education are included. This finding illustrates the need to consider aggregate education in future assessments of the total impact of education.     

Differential fertility and family limitation in an urban community of Uttar Pradesh

The study relates to an investigation of the fertility pattern of a sample of 1018 wives drawn from Lucknow and Kanpur, the two biggest cities of Uttar Pradesh. The sample is stratified with respect to religion and caste, and income. It reveals significant inter-community differences, Muslims and low-caste Hindus showing nearly equal fertility, and high-caste Hindus and Christians showing comparatively lower levels. The proportion of small families (three children or less) is obviously higher in groups with lower fertility, but there is a wide measure of dispersion in each group. Fertility is seen to decline with a rise in income, but not until we cross the income level of Rs 300 per month. Consistent with the differential trends in fertility, striking variations are also observed in the extent of contraceptive practice in different groups. Groups with lower fertility also show a higher frequency of birth control. Birth controllers have lower fertility than the non-controllers, and birth control appears to play a not inconsequential rôle in causing differential trends in fertility.     

The fertility transition around the world

In this paper, we study the evolution of the distribution of fertility rates across the world from 1950 to 2005 using parametric mixture models. We demonstrate the existence of twin peaks and the division of the world’s countries in two distinct components: a high-fertility regime and a low-fertility regime. Whereas the significance of twin peaks vanishes over time, the two fertility regimes continue to exists over the whole observation period. In 1950, about two thirds of the world’s countries belonged to the high-fertility regime and the rest constituted the low-fertility regime. By the year 2005, this picture has reversed. Within both the low- and the high-fertility regime, the average fertility rate declined, with a larger absolute decline within the high-fertility regime. Visually, the two peaks moved closer together. For the low-fertility regime, we find both β- and σ -convergence but we cannot establish any convergence pattern for the high-fertility regime. Our results support the idea of conditional convergence where the condition is the successful initiation of the fertility transition. The results are less supportive of the existence of a unique high-fertility equilibrium.     

Modelling period fertility: Schooling and intervals following a birth in Eastern Africa

We describe a regression-based approach to the modelling of age-, order-, and duration-specific period fertility, using retrospective survey data. The approach produces results that are free of selection biases and can be used to study differential fertility. It is applied to Demographic and Health Survey data for Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe to investigate differential trends in fertility by education. Parity progression fell and the intervals following each birth lengthened between the 1970s and 2000s in all four countries. Fertility fell most among women with secondary education. In contrast to other world regions, postponement of successive births for extended periods accounted for much of the initial drop in fertility in these African countries. However, family size limitation by women with secondary education in Ethiopia and Kenya and longer birth spacing in Zimbabwe also played significant roles. Thus, birth control is being adopted in Eastern Africa in response to diverse changes in fertility preferences.     

Land cover change and fertility in West-Central Africa: rural livelihoods and the vicious circle model

The vicious circle argument, rooted in a neo-Malthusian tradition, states that resource scarcity increases the demand for child labor and leads to higher fertility. The rural livelihood framework, on the other hand, contends that households employ multiple strategies, only one of which involves adjusting their fertility levels as a response to environmental pressures. This study provides a unique test of both theories by examining the relationship between land cover change and fertility across hundreds of rural communities in four West-Central African countries. The findings reveal a complex relationship between natural capital and fertility. In communities where natural capital was initially low, a further decline in that capital is associated with both higher fertility preferences and levels. However, we find that fertility preferences and behavior are often discordant, with notable within-community differences in response to decline in natural capital across levels of household wealth.     

Social Health Indicators and Economic Growth: Evidence from East Asia and Pacific,Middle East and North Africa,South Asia,and Sub-Saharan Africa

The objective of this study is to empirically investigate a two-way statistical relationship between the social health indicators and economic growth in the context of four major regions of the world i.e., East Asia and Pacific, Middle East and North Africa (MENA), South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. To recognize the relationship between the two variables, a time series, co-integration and Granger causality tests have been employed. Aggregate secondary data pertaining to these four regions from 1975 to 2011 on economic growth and social health indicators i.e., infant mortality, child abuse, child poverty, unemployment, weekly wages, health insurance coverage, teenage suicide, teenage drug abuse, high school dropouts, poverty, out-of-pocket health costs, homicides, alcohol related traffic fatalities, food insecurity, income inequality, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, basic health units and rural health centers has been used for analysis. This study evaluates four alternative but equally plausible hypotheses, each with different policy implications. These are: (1) social health indicators Granger cause economic growth, (2) economic growth Granger cause social health indicators (the conventional view), (3) There is a bi-directional causality between the two variables and (4) Both variables are causality independent (although highly correlated). The empirical results only moderately support the conventional view that economic growth has significant long run casual effect on social health indicators in East Asia and Pacific, MENA, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. The present study find evident of unidirectional causality running towards economic growth to social health indicators, although, there are some bidirectional causality also exists between the variables. The percentage of unidirectional causality between economic growth and social health indicators is larger than bidirectional or neutrality hypothesis.     

The fertility of two-generation urbanites

In this paper it is argued that in studies of urban fertility, the relationship between socio-economic variables and fertility has been obscured by the presence of rural migrants in the populations under investigation. Accordingly, data obtained from families of completed fertility in six probability samples of metropolitan Detroit are divided into two groups, farm migrants and two-generation urbanites.

In general, the socio-economic differences in fertility observed among the “pure” urban types in Detroit are found to be small and inconsistent, most of them being statistically insignificant. The inverse fertility pattern found in the total Detroit population is attributed to : (a) the overrepresentation of farm migrants (who have high fertility) in the lowest social and economic positions in the city, and (b) the pronounced inverse pattern of fertility among the farm migrants.

It is suggested that the absence of an inverse fertility pattern among twogeneration urbanites and its presence among the farm migrants can be attributed to differences in family organization.     

The prediction of completed fertility

There has been considerable interest in the relation between familysize desires and completed fertility. Longitudinal data from the Princeton Fertility Study provide a unique opportunity to compare the number of children desired after the birth of a second child to the size of completed families. The average number of children desired by women after the birth of their second child predicts very well the average size of their completed families. The average family size desired at the first interview and average estimated completed family size some eight years later are identical for the total sample, and vary hardly at all within religious or education subgroups. One-third of the variance in the completed fertility of couples is "explained" by wife's family-size desires and the proportion of explained variance increases to two-fifths when we include the husband's first interview desires and the interval between marriage and second birth. Yet in spite of the relatively high correlation between desires and achievement, only 41 percent of these women achieved exactly the number of children they desired at the first interview, while 14 percent had two children more or fewer than originally desired. Nevertheless, data on contraceptive efficiency indicate that desires after the birth of the second child constitute meaningful goals in terms of which the respondents regulate their subsequent behavior-efficacy of contraceptive practice shows substantial improvement after the desired number has been achieved.     

Completing the fertility transition in the developing world: The role of educational differences and fertility preferences

This study summarizes patterns of educational differentials in wanted and unwanted fertility at different stages of the fertility transition. The data are from Demographic and Health Surveys in 57 less developed countries. As the transition proceeds, educational differentials in wanted fertility tend to decline and differentials in unwanted fertility tend to rise. An assessment of fertility patterns in developed and less developed countries with low fertility concludes that these differentials are likely to remain substantial when less developed countries reach the end of their transitions. This conclusion implies that the educational composition of the population remains a key predictor of overall fertility in late transitional countries and that low levels of schooling can be a cause of stalling fertility.