Socioeconomic differentials in fertility and family formation

China has the world’s most stringent family planning policy with integrated, usually coercive approach to implement it. However, according to China’s 2005 National 1% Population Survey, the national rate of unauthorized births averaged at 18.6% over the last 20 years. How well has China's family planning policy worked? What are the causes for noncompliant fertility behaviors? This paper studies the patterns and determinants of unauthorized fertility behaviors in China from macro-, meso- and micro-perspectives using the 2005 population survey data and logistic regression analysis. Results show that the rate of unauthorized births differs considerably across China and between policy types. Rural one-child policy areas had the rate as high as 37.7%, contrasting to a rate of 12.6% in urban one-child policy areas. Strong son preference is the main and direct factor to bring about the resistance to birth control. While socioeconomic development contributes to quelling resistance to the family planning program, the relationship is not simply linear. Family income has a U-shape effect on the probability of unauthorized fertility behaviors, and many individual characteristics like education and age at first birth also have significant influence on the risk of unauthorized births. Theoretical and policy implications are also discussed.

Our aim is to explore socioeconomic fertility differentials in an industrializing community; to gain insight about the details and discuss possible mechanisms. The study starts well before industrialization and finishes at the end of the transition. We use longitudinal individual-level data from the Scanian Economic-Demographic Database, which contains demographic as well as socioeconomic information, including occupation, landholding and income. In the analysis we use hazard regressions with shared frailty at the family level. The transition involved not only parity-specific stopping but also spacing. While the upper social strata had higher fertility prior to the transition, they started to control their fertility earlier, by the 1880s, and also more consistently. Farmers, the middle class and skilled workers followed in the decades after, and unskilled workers with some additional delay. These findings are inconsistent with several of the major explanations in the literature, such as mortality decline, increased female labor force participation and a quantity-quality trade-off, but consistent with an innovation process where new ideas and attitudes about family limitation spread from the elite to other social groups.

Previous studies of China’s exceptionally high sex ratio at birth have emphasized the prevailing national and regional fertility policy as well as the gendered composition of children ever born. Little attention, meanwhile, has been paid to the effect of fertility intentions of the sex of next birth for a household. In the paper, we use the data from China’s 2001 national family planning and reproductive health and hierarchical models to study how macro factors (mainly fertility policy) and micro factors (mainly fertility intention and children composition) affect the sex of next birth. We find that fertility policy exerts a significant effect on the sex of next, but this effect is intertwined by children composition. For those having had a son (or sons), the policy exerts no effect, but for those with only daughters, the effect is quite significant. Crucially, however, fertility intention as independent from fertility policy has a significant effect on the sex of next birth.

The main purpose of this study is to explore the direction of mobility and socioeconomic differentials in fertility among foreign wives in Korea. Special attention is focused on the effects of foreign wives’ perception for upward mobility on fertility. Changes in relative economic status through marriage are referred to as the direction of mobility, as highly influential factors to explain the fertility behavior of foreign wives. An analytical model of the causal structure was set up with direction of mobility, and socioeconomic level as explanation variables for this study. The 2009 Korean National Multi-culture Family Survey was used. The study sample is composed of foreign wives (Korean-Chinese, Han-Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipina and Cambodian) under the age of 49 married to Korean men. Preliminary results of the analysis are found to be consistent with the hypothesis of the direction of mobility. The perception for direction of mobility exerts an independent effect on fertility, apart from socioeconomic and demographic variables. The results show that foreign wives who perceive their marriage as upward mobility tend to have a greater number of children.

The Beckerian hypothesis, which forms much of the cornerstone of the study of the association between income and fertility levels suggests that there is a negative association between number of children and levels of income such that at higher income levels more children must be traded off for “better” quality ones. Our contention is that it is not necessarily the case that couples at higher end of the income scale will have fewer but higher quality children than those with lower incomes. Recasting the income- fertility association in a social mobility framework and drawing on the seminal work of Susan Greenhalgh on “fertility as mobility” in late nineteenth century traditional Chinese society and modifying Coale’s three necessary and sufficient conditions for demographic transition, we argue that even couples lower down the income scale will be willing to invest in quality rather than quantity of children if the institutional framework in terms of education and employment opportunities enhance mobility prospects. We examine this alternate theoretical framework using data from the India Human Development Survey (2005). Preliminary cross tabulations provide support for our hypothesis; which we examine further in a regression framework controlling for couples’ background information as caste and location.

Earlier investigations have shown associations between a woman’s chance of having a child, or various proximate determinants of her fertility, and the socioeconomic resources in the community in which she lives, net of her own resources. This study, which is based on DHS surveys from 28 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, adds to the knowledge about this issue. With a focus on first and higher-order birth rates, four specific questions are addressed. One result is that the negative associations between a woman’s birth rates and the average education in the census enumeration area in which she lives, net of her own education, have remained stable or become stronger over the last decade. Second, these associations are most pronounced among women who score high on indicators of socioeconomic development, which suggests that they may become further strengthened. Third, associations even appear when a fixed-effects approach – based on data from two DHS surveys with GPS coordinates in each country – is employed to control for unobserved constant characteristics of units at a slightly higher level than the census enumeration area. Fourth, local processes seem to be particularly important: the education among women in the province or nearest census enumeration areas is not inversely associated with fertility.

The relationship between female education and fertility is varied and complex but extensively discussed in the literature. This article re-assesses the relationship between female education and fertility using data from Demographic and Health Surveys. Fifty-eight countries are explored. One problem with education variable in DHS data is the inconsistencies in the definition of education categories within and across countries. We harmonized the education variable to the UNESCO’s definition. The analyses conducted highlight considerable heterogeneity across total fertility rate (TFR) levels and differentials by education categories. However some empirical regularity can be isolated. For instance, we found the usual negative relationship between TFR and female education, with a monotonic pattern across education categories. Secondly, we will test whether the fertility differential is significantly different across education categories by presenting bootstrapped confidence intervals and standard errors. The final results of the analysis will be useful in predicting the fertility in the future.

The Second Demographic Transition posits that shifts in values have led to the postponement of marriage and childbearing, increases in cohabitation and increases in childbearing within cohabitation. It is not clear, however, whether these behaviors are practiced equally by all strata of society. Here we employ harmonized union and reproductive histories from the United States and 14 countries in Europe to examine how family formation behaviors are practiced by different educational groups. We use hazard models to explore the educational gradient of 1) entrance into first co-residential union; 2) entrance into marriage versus unmarried cohabitation; and 3) entrance into parenthood. For those in a cohabiting union we specifically focus on the educational gradient of experiencing marriage, a separation or a nonmarital birth. First results suggest that in France, Norway, and Austria, although the more highly educated frequently enter unmarried cohabitation, they are less likely than the lower educated to stay in unmarried cohabitation when having children. The number of countries analyzed will be expanded to explore how the educational gradient of these new behaviors may or may not be similar across countries.

Child marriage –defined by UNICEF as marriage before age 18 –is a reality for millions of women. This study explores the prevalence and determinants of child marriage in Bangladesh using 2007 Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey data. Both quantitative and qualitative statistical techniques were employed in this study. Overall, the prevalence of child marriage among women aged 20-49 were 82% in Bangladesh. The prevalence was higher in rural than urban areas. The both birth and marriage cohorts of women indicate that child marriage has reduced over time. The multivariate logistic regression analyses yielded quantitatively important and reliable estimates of the risk of child marriage. The rural women were significantly more likely to be married as a child than urban women. Women’s education appeared as the most single significant determinant of child marriage. The other factors identified to have significant relationship with child marriage are religion, place of region and wealth index. Education is the most viable means for raising females’ age at marriage. Remaining girls in schooling for extended period, poverty alleviation and proper implementation of the ordinance of age at first marriage may further reduce child marriage in Bangladesh.

This study makes a comprehensive examination on the evolution and trend of male marriage squeeze in China since 1950 and employs the cohort analysis of the redundant boys born since 1983 to estimate the yearly total amount of surplus males in next 60 years. This work concludes that the phenomenon of Chinese marriage squeeze already existed since 1950, in 1960s of the twentieth Century China has experienced the most severe male marriage squeeze. Although in the twenty years between 1990 and 2010, there is no obvious marriage squeeze in China, 70% of surplus males in the future was born because of the increasingly high sex ratio at birth since 1983. These young boys and male babies will grow to be surplus males with a speed of 1.31 million each year in next 20 years. The total amount of excess males will reach up to 30 million in 2028, 5.6% of the total males at the age of married, and peak at 41.41million in 2043, 7.6% of the total males at the age of married. About in 2057 the total amount of excess males will decrease to less than 30 million which means that the total amount of excess males between 30 million and 40 million will last almost 30 years. If the sex ratio at birth in the future remains as high as that in 2012, the male marriage squeeze will be more serious.