Fertility differences in Andean countries: A reply to W. H. James

Abstract The lower fertility of the Indian-speaking parts of Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru compared with the Spanish-speaking parts of these nations has been the topic of several previous articles in this journal. In last year's journal William H. James argued that higher altitude was the chief cause of this reduced fertility level, whereas D. M. Heer has earlier argued that it might be accounted for by higher proportions of women in the labour force. James's data and Heer's further computations suggest that James's explanation has substantially more merit than that originally advanced by Heer.     

The effect of altitude on fertility in Andean countries

Abstract In papers previously published in this journal J. M. Stycos and D. M. Heer have shown that fertility is lower in the economically underdeveloped Indian-speaking parts of Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia than in the more prosperous Spanish-speaking parts. Stycos concluded that the reason for the fertility difference in Peru is the greater marital instability of the Indian speakers which decreased their total exposure to the risk of conception. Heer suggested instead that the causes of the difference may be voluntary. The present paper questions Heer's analysis, and offers the explanation that the difference may be attributed to the physiological effects of altitude.     

A further note on the relation between economic development and fertility

The relationship between economic development and fertility has been examined by several scholars. In particular Heer, using data from 41 nations (24 developing and 17 developed) tested three hypotheses. His objective was to reconcile the two prevailing views in this context, namely, that economic development on one hand promotes and on the-other inhibits fertility. However, when we reran Heer’s data separately for the two groups of countries in his list, the pattern of relationships between the variables that he used changed significantly. On this basis, we restricted this study to a further examination of his three hypotheses using data from developing nations only but for two points in time. The evidence from this study seems to support two of the hypotheses in Heer’s study. In other words, whether the analysis of this relationship is restricted to developing nations or includes both developed and developing nations, it remains true that increased economic development implies a decreased illiteracy and a decreased IMR; a decreased illiteracy and IMR are optimal conditions of low fertility. Nonetheless, the data examined here do not seem to resolve the question of whether increased economic development implies a decreased fertility. Accordingly, continued testing of the hypothesis at further points in time with more accurate data is in order.     

Do unintended pregnancies carried to term lead to adverse outcomes for mother and child? An assessment in five developing countries

This paper investigates whether children later reported as having been unwanted or mistimed at conception will, when compared with children reported as wanted, show adverse effects when the following criteria are applied: receipt of antenatal care before the sixth month of gestation, supervised delivery, full vaccination of the child, and child growth (stunting). The study uses data from five recent Demographic and Health Survey enquiries in Bolivia, Egypt, Kenya, Peru, and the Philippines. In Peru, children unwanted at conception were found to have significantly worse outcomes than other children, but in the other countries, a systematic effect was found only for receipt of antenatal care. Weak measurement of the complex concept of wantedness may have contributed to these results. Birth order of the child, with which wantedness is inextricably linked, has more powerful and pervasive effects, with first-born and second-born children being much less likely to show adverse effects.     

Trends in reproductive behavior among young single women in Colombia and Peru: 1985–1999

Using "calendar" data for single women aged 15-24 from successive Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) conducted in Colombia and Peru during the 1990s, we document trends, year by year, in sexual activity, the use of contraceptives, and subsequent reproductive outcomes. We provide evidence of the important and hitherto largely untapped potential of DHS calendar data to draw complete sexual and reproductive profiles when data from various surveys are integrated. Over the period 1985-1999, young single women in both Colombia and Peru became sexually active at younger ages. The use of contraceptives, especially the use of condoms, increased but did not fully offset the rise in sexual activity, and thus the incidence of premarital conceptions rose among young single women. In both countries, sharp declines occurred in the proportion of premaritally conceived births that were reported as being wanted.     

Mortality level,desired family size,and population increase: Comment

In this paper an attempt is made to elaborate on the behavioral assumptions underlying a simulation model published in a previous volume of this journal (Heer and Smith, 1968). The present paper contains a discussion of the ways in which a fall in the death rate of children will affect the desirability of another birth if the family's objective is to have a son surviving to the father's sixty-fifth birthday. The death rate affects both the expected costs of and benefits from an additional birth. An examination of the effects of a decline in child mortality indicates that the benefits from an additional birth fall and the expected costs rise as a result of the decline. Thus a death rate will eventually be reached where costs exceed benefits, and parents will not desire an additional pregnancy.     

秘鲁城市女性劳动参与的微观研究

本文利用2001年秘鲁国家统计和信息局第三期家庭抽样调查数据,运用Logistic回归,分析了在秘鲁城市中,人口、经济和教育变量是如何影响女性劳动参与的.并且将首都利马和利马以外的其他地区加以区分来进行分析。研究结果表明在秘鲁城市范围内.女性劳动参与随着女性生命周期的变化出现了很明确的模式;生育、婚姻状况、与家长的关系、接受高等教育(指硕士及以上和培训)明显地影响女性劳动参与。在首都利马和其他地区的大部分影响方向很类似。但是在首都利马的影响程度要大一些。     

Altitude, fertility and mortality in Andean countries

Abstract Using the census data for Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, previous writers have investigated some possible determinants of inter-regional differences in fertility; language spoken, female participation rates, and altitude. This paper points out the many sources of inaccuracy in the census data used. It argues that the indicators of unusually low fertility in the highland, predominantly Indianspeaking areas fail to control effectively for the very high levels of infant mortality in these regions. Fragmentary survey results give some indication of the scale of infant mortality, and appear to refute the idea that fertility is exceptionally low in areas of high altitude. In an attempt to explain why such high mortality rates persist in the Andean region the main health problems of Bolivia are examined. It seems that the causes are economic and social, rather than physiological. Unfortunately a change of policy which reduced death rates would produce grave new social problems.     

Mortality risks,sequential decisions on births,and population growth

The population growth rates implied by parental attempts to be highly certain of having a surviving son for old-age support are investigated. At life expectancies of 40 to 65 years, family-planning “strategies” using contraception are found to imply markedly lower growth rates (1.01.5 percent vs. 2.5 percent) than are both commonly observed and also previously derived by Heer and Smith. In contrast to strategies relying only on sterilization, contraceptive spacing of births permits parents to buy time and information. In particular, they can postpone deciding whether to have another child until they see if their infant son will survive the earliest years of childhood. These results suggest that many less developed countries might achieve a substantial reduction in birth rates, provided that family-planning programs emphasized contraception as well as sterilization and effectively communicated the idea of spacing births. Factors bearing on the range of applicability of the old-age-security hypothesis, and any results and policies derived from it, are also briefly analyzed.     

Quality of care in Peru: measuring its impact. Field report

A report published in 1995 by the Population Council described the impact of the quality of family planning services on the incidence of unplanned pregnancy in Peru. This report followed a 1994 study that assessed the impact of quality on contraceptive usage by linking data from Peru's 1991-92 Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) and a 1992 Peru Situational Analysis study of the status of family planning (FP) services at 3000 individual service delivery points. The 1995 study added data from a follow-up survey of a sample of the DHS respondents. The 1994 study used an innovative quality of care index that measured the quality of FP services available in a geographic area to women with partners living nearby. This index was then assigned to every woman in the area and correlated with her use of modern contraceptives. The analysis revealed that availability of high-quality FP services greatly increased the number of women using modern contraception. The 1995 study analyzed the impact of quality of care on rates of unintended pregnancy and found that the percentage of unwanted births was significantly higher in areas with low-quality FP services. The researchers note that these results only hint at a relationship between quality of care and reproductive behavior and that the findings should be interpreted conservatively. However, the studies support the importance of investing in quality FP care.     

Dissolution of first unions in Colombia,Panama, and Peru

An analysis of marital histories from World Fertility Survey data in Colombia, Panama, and Peru indicates a high level of union dissolution: the probabilities of a first union ending by separation within twenty years of the onset of union equal .27, .40, and .18 in the three countries respectively. Dissolution probabilities are especially high among women with young ages at first union and among women residing in urban areas. For all subgroups studied, consensual unions are characterized by several times the risk of separation of legal marriages. Consensual unions are especially frequent among women in rural areas, women with little education and women who enter unions at young ages. The different prevalence of consensual unions among the different subgroups affects the associations between union stability and various correlates so that it becomes essential to investigate the factors affecting union stability for both consensual unions and legal marriages. In spite of high dissolution rates, remarriage rates in all three countries are also high, as are the percentages of time spent in a union. Hence, the potential effects of voluntary disruption of unions on fertility appear to be modest.     

Meeting health and family planning needs in Latin America and the Caribbean

The operations research and technical assistance (OR/TA) project in The Population Council has concentrated on fertility and infant mortality issues in Latin American and the Caribbean for more than a decade through INOPAL. INOPAL is an acronym for Investigacion Operacional en Planificacion Familiar y Atencion Materno-Infantil para America Latina y el Caribe (Operations Research in Family Planning and Maternal-Child Health in Latin America and the Caribbean). In March 1995, the project entered its third phase, INOPAL III, with the renewal of its contract from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). To facilitate communication between INOPAL, collaborating agencies, and USAID, INOPAL Director James Foreit moved from Peru to a Council office in Washington, D.C. INOPAL has six objectives: 1) to test the integration of family planning and reproductive health services; 2) to increase access to family planning; 3) to develop strategies to reach special populations; 4) to improve the sustainability of family planning programs; 5) to improve service quality; and 6) to institutionalize operations research capability in the region. INOPAL II conducted 61 subprojects in 12 countries in collaboration with 24 USAID cooperating agencies and other international organizations. The project established new services for postpartum women, adolescents, and rural women; improved program quality and financial sustainability; increased vasectomy promotion and the range of available contraceptives; and developed new modes of service delivery. A key finding of INOPAL II operations research was the importance of increasing cost-effectiveness to ensure program sustainability. INOPAL III will work toward all six objectives, with an emphasis on integrating reproductive health and family planning services. Operations research and technical assistance (OR/TA) subprojects will focus on the prevention and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases, perinatal and postpartum care, and postabortion care.     

Latin American Households in Comparative Perspective

Comparative family sociology has had little to say about the Latin American family or household despite it links to a European colonial culture mixed with a distinct set of indigenous and historical circumstances. In this paper tentative judgements are put forward about the similarities and differences between the Western and Latin American household by examining four of its dimensions: the household's relative complexity, the separate residence of conjugal units, the incidence of households headed by women, and the incidence of household members being unrelated to the head. Data come from the World Fertility Survey household files gathered during the middle 1970s in six countries: Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Colombia and Peru. We find that household complexity in the six countries is intermediate between that of the West and East. Many of the households are extended laterally instead of vertically, because conjugal couples tend to reside in separate households, but often live with unmarried relatives as well. In addition, a high level of marital instability results in a significant proportion of households headed by women, many of them containing members of the extended family. Finally, whereas the circulation of young unmarried people of both sexes was common in rural areas in the West, being an unrelated individual in another's household is most common in urban areas among females between 15 and 19 years old.     

Dynamics of contraceptive use and breastfeeding during the post-partum period in Peru and Indonesia

This paper examines the interaction between contraceptive use and breastfeeding in relation to resumption of intercourse and duration of amenorrhea post-partum. We used data from the month-by-month calendar of reproductive events from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in Peru and Indonesia. The analyses show that breastfeeding women were less likely than non-breastfeeding women to have resumed sexual intercourse in the early months post-partum in both countries. In Peru, but not in Indonesia, breastfeeding women had a significantly lower odds than non-breastfeeding women of adopting contraception. Although the likelihood of contraceptive adoption was highest in the month women resumed menstruation in both countries, about ten per cent of subsequent pregnancies occurred to women before they resumed menses. These results emphasize the importance of integrating breastfeeding counselling and family planning services in programmes serving post-partum women, as a means of enabling those who wish to space their next birth to avoid exposure to the risk of a pregnancy that may precede the return of menses.     

Rural–Urban Child Height for Age Trajectories and Their Heterogeneous Determinants in Four Developing Countries

The large literature on health differentials between rural and urban areas relies almost exclusively on cross-sectional data. Bringing together the demographic literature on area-level health inequalities with the bio-physiological literature on children’s catch-up growth over time, this paper uses panel data to investigate the stability and origins of rural–urban health differentials. Using data from the Young Lives longitudinal study of child poverty, I present evidence of large level differences but similar trends in rural versus urban children’s height for age in four developing countries. Further, observable characteristics of children’s environment such as their household wealth, mother’s education, and epidemiological environment explain these differentials in most contexts. In Peru, where they do not, children’s birthweight and mothers’ health and other characteristics suggest that initial endowments—even before birth—may play an important role in explaining "residual" rural–urban child height inequalities. These latter results imply that prioritizing maternal nutrition and health is essential—particularly where rural–urban height inequalities are large. Interventions to reduce area-level health inequalities should begin even before birth.     

A Household-Based Distribution-Sensitive Human Development Index: An Empirical Application to Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru

In measuring human development, one of the main concerns relates to the inclusion of a measure that penalizes inequalities in the distribution of achievements across the population. Using indicators from nationally representative household surveys and census data, this paper proposes a straightforward methodology to estimate a household-based distribution-sensitive human development index aggregated through generalized means. The evidence shows that the losses in human development due to inequality reach up 22, 29 and 57% in Mexico, Peru and Nicaragua, respectively. Among dimensions, the loss in the income index reaches up 61% in Nicaragua, while the education index appears as the most sensitive in the case of Mexico and Peru, with a percentage of loss between 38 and 48%. The importance of household-level calculations is highlighted when we compare the indices computed from the entire distribution with those existing indices computed for quintiles of the distribution, which minimizes the losses due to inequality. Overall, the estimations evidence a higher sensitivity of the index to inequality, and therefore an important space for public action to reduce inequality that could involve positive development returns.     

Family Planning and Child Health Care: Effect of the Peruvian Programa de Salud Reproductiva y Planificación Familiar, 1996–2000

Our study estimates the effects of exposure to a family planning program which promoted surgical contraception for the first time in Peru on women's use of birth control methods and their children's health. While a broad program, the Programa de Salud Reproductiva y Planificación Familiar forced many indigenous women to undergo sterilization. We compare provinces affected by the program earlier with provinces affected later, before and after the policy. Overall, the results indicate that women in treated areas were more likely to use both temporary and permanent contraceptive methods and their children were less likely to die within their first year of life, partly due to longer breastfeeding. However, we observe heterogeneity by ethnicity. In treated provinces, nonindigenous children benefited from the policy regardless of their mothers’ choice of contraceptive method, while there were few positive impacts for indigenous children whose mothers underwent sterilization. This suggests that coercive or aggressively implemented family planning programs may not confer health benefits on children.     

Correction to: Subsequent Migration of Immigrants Within Australia, 1981–2016

Population Research and Policy Review - The article Subsequent Migration of Immigrants Within Australia, 1981–2016, written by James Raymer and Bernard Baffour, was originally published...     

The determinants of fertility in rural Peru: Program effects in the early years of the national family planning program

Using data from the 1991 Peru Demographic Health Survey, a linked Situation Analysis, and a unique region-level data set, this paper examines the determinants of fertility in rural Peru before and after the 1985 enactment of its National Policy on Population. The empirical framework combines a model of the timing and spacing of conceptions with a model of the timing of the placement of family planning services in communities in order to control for non-random placement of services. Results show the program helped reduce fertility post 1985. The magnitude of the effects is quantified with simulations. All correspondence to David Guilkey.We thank the editor and two referees for detailed comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Funding support for this project was provided by the MEASURE Evaluation Project under a Cooperative Agreement between the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Carolina Population Center (Number HRN-A-00-97-0018-00). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and not the sponsoring agency. Responsible editor: Junsen Zhang.     

Analysis of child labour in Peru and Pakistan: A comparative study

This paper analyses child labour participation and its key determinants using data sets from Peru and Pakistan. The results include tests of the ‘Luxury’ and ‘Substitution’ hypotheses that play key roles in recent studies on child labour and child schooling. The results reject both hypotheses in the context of child labour in Pakistan and suggest that income and related variables do not have the expected negative effect on children's work input. Rising wages of adult female labour in Pakistan, and falling adult male wage in Peru lead to increased participation of children in the labour market. The results on the combined country data formally establish the presence of strong individual country effects in the estimated regressions. For example, ceteris paribus, a Peruvian child is more likely to experience schooling than a Pakistani child. However, both countries agree on the positive role that adult female education and infrastructure investment in basic amenities can play in discouraging child labour and encouraging child schooling. Received: 24 August 1998/Accepted: 10 March 1999