Fertility,life cycle stage and female labor Force participation in Rhode Island: A retrospective overview

Considerable historical evidence indicates a long term increase in female labor force participation in the United States during the twentieth century. However, there are only limited data available for analyzing this secular trend in any depth. Comprehensive retrospective data for a representative sample of 1,578 once-married Rhode Island women are utilized to examine the changing historical relationships between female work participation in selected life cycle intervals and educatonal attainment. The data indicate that there has been a recent convergence of labor force rates between better and less educated women, in some instances reversing the traditional pattern of higher labor force rates for less educated women. This convergence reflects primarily an extraordinary in-crease in labor force participation for women with at least twelve years of school at all stages of the childbearing period. Also highlighted is the close relationship between labor force participation in one life cycle interval and probability of participation in subsequent intervals. It is found that working or not working in one life cycle is a useful predictor of subsequent work participation. Also, a greater tendency for more recent cohorts of women to re-enter the labor force after childbearing is noted.     

Kenya's record population growth: a dilemma of development

The causes and implications of Kenya's 4% rate of natural increase and fertility rate of 8.1 births per woman were examined. Attention was directed to the following: pronatalist pressures; inadvertent pronatalist impact of development; women's education and employment and fertility; population growth and pressures; mortality decline and population growth; fertility levels and differentials; fertility desires; the family planning program; and family planning knowledge, attitudes, and practice. Kenya's development success has worked to push up the population growth rate. Improved health care and nutrition halved infant mortality from 160 to 87 deaths/1000 live births between 1958 and 1977 and a marked increase in primary school enrollment may be factors in the birthrate increase to 53/1000 population. At this time fertility is highest among women with 1-4 years of education. The 1977-1978 Kenya Fertility Survey showed that only 5.8% of married women were using modern contraception, indicating that the national family planning program, established in 1967, has made little progress. Program difficulties have included shortages of staff, supplies and easily accessible clinic as well as an almost universal desire on the part of Kenyans for families of at least 7 children. Children are viewed as essential to survival and status to the rural population.     

Labor supply behavior of prospective and new mothers

Utilizing unique data generated from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Young Women, this paper examines the labor force participation of young mothers in the months immediately preceding and following the birth of the first child. Labor supply behavior at this point in the life cycle is described in greater detail than has hitherto been available. In addition, we analyze the independent effect of several factors of interest on the probability that a young woman will be in the labor force during various intervals surrounding the first birth.     

Trends in the determinants of early childbearing

This study uses data from the young women's and new youth cohort of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth Labor Market Experience to examine the extent to which socioeconomic background factors and race have changed in their ability to predict a first birth before age 19 between 1968 and 1980 for women aged nineteen to twenty-three. The authors find little support for their hypothesis that the increasing availability of contraception and abortion for young women from all social classes reduces the traditionally strong inverse association between social class and early childbearing. There is evidence that, even after controlling for changes in socioeconomic background factors, black young women are significantly more likely than their white counterparts to bear children before age 19 in 1980 and the relative gap between races in this regard did not alter perceptively during that period.Prepared for presentation at the Population Association of America meetings, April/May 1987. The authors wish to thank Ronald D'Amico and Susan H. Mott for their helpful comments. This report was partially prepared under a contract with the U.S. Department of Labor with funds provided through an interagency agreement with the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Interpretations or viewpoints in this document do not necessarily represent the official position or policy of the Department of Labor or the NICHD.     

Production planning in practice

The changes and pressures facing the manufacturing and engineering industries today are increasing the importance of effective aggregate manpower and production planning. Several different theoretical optimisation models to tackle this problem have been described in detail in the literature but there have been few applications of them in practice.The reasons for this are many but include: the difficulty in expressing managements' conflicting and mixed objectives in an objective function; the necessity to oversimplify real life systems to enable these methods to be used; the simplistic approach to manpower planning used in these models; the difficulty in gaining managements' acceptance and finally the fact that what management actually wants is a tool to assist them in planning and decision making.What is being used by many managements is a case-study deterministic simulation model. Many companies are adopting this type of model for all types of planning and twelve out of twenty-seven companies visited in a research project described in this paper were using this type of model for aggregate manpower and production planning. It is proving to be an effective management tool and is being readily accepted principally because modern specialised financial modelling languages are enabling these models to be built, understood and used by non-specialist managers.