Socioeconomic differentials in fertility and family formation

So far the research in reproductive health and demographic behaviour is focused to individual level variables taking the wife or husband alone. However, ICPD conference in Cairo in 1994 has put forth demand to consider both men and women in its way to improve the health of women and children. Keeping this in view, there is ample research being carried out to study the effects of couple characteristics on health of the women and children. In India, the researches on understanding the relationship between couple characteristics and reproductive behaviour are scarce. The major objective of this paper is study the gap in couple characteristics and its impact on the fertility(children ever born).The present paper discusses three important couple characteristics namely age, education and caste differentials among the couples in India and their effects on fertility by using data from a large scale and national representative National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3, 2005-06). It is clear from the findings that age and educational gap among the couples have positive effect on their fertility implying that with the increase in age and education difference among couples, fertility also increases.

First birth interval i.e. the interval between marriage and first birth plays an important role in determination of fertility level of the society. It is found that in Indian traditional society where use of contraceptives is rare before first birth, waiting time to first conception, which is generally nine months smaller than the interval between marriage and first birth, can be used in determination of fertility of a female. Moreover, several socio-demographic factors influence the waiting time to first conception in Indian social contexts. The objective of the study is to observe the effect of some socio-demographic characteristics on the waiting time to first conception. In the present analysis weibull regression techniques has been used over non-parametric regression techniques because it captures the heterogeneity in the phenomenon having increasing hazard better than a non-parametric regression.
The data has been used from NFHS-III for the females of the one of the most populous state of India known as Uttar Pradesh. According to analysis without heterogeneity; place of residence, religion and spousal age difference are found significant, whereas, analysis with heterogeneity explains the significance of place of residence, religion, spousal age difference as well as of age at first marriage.

The study is an attempt to focus on the decline in fertility in Odisha, one of the extremely undeveloped states of India. In spite of having widespread poverty, low level of industrialization and urbanization, agrarian economy the decline of fertility in Odisha, is quite impressive. Results based on the secondary data sources and also on a field investigation in one district of Odisha revealed that there is a clear change in the value of children due to increasing aspirations of the parents and the rise in the cost of living. There is a conscious emphasis on enhancing the quality of life across social and occupational class. This has lead to the classical quantity-quality trade off and lower family size desires. Economic benefits from children have declined. Though son as the source of old age support and care still persists; looking at the changing society and increased preference for nuclear family, majority are not sure that the son/s would actually support them in old age. Overall the cost of children has increased in relation to benefits. To meet the increased cost the strategy is to adopt a small family. For this adoption, means were provided by government sponsored family planning programme.

This mix study aims to examine the average preferred family size (fertility preference) and intention and their gap among newly married men and women in Tehran. The distributional characteristics of preference and intension for one child and their correlates are also assessed. It was conducted in 2012 and comprised of three phases. A representative sample of the survey (second phase) was examined. Nearly, 871 about to marry men and women, attended to premarital compulsory courses in 8 health centers in different geographical areas of Tehran were assessed using self-administered anonymous questionnaire. Data were cleaned and analyzed using SPSS –V18.
Mean age of the sample was 26.9 (SD=4.3). Mean ideal number of children reported by men was 1.70 (SD=0.97) and by women was 1.72 (SD=0.715). Mean number of intended children among men was 1.64(SD=1.06) and among women was 1.60(SD=0.7). Multivariate analysis showed predictors of intention for single child and its differences by gender. This study have important implications for population policies in Iran.

Modeling age specific fertility rates is of great importance in demography because of their influence on population growth. Although we have a variety of fertility models in the demographic literature, most of them do not have any demographic interpretation for their parameters. It is generally expected that models with behavioural interpretation are more universal than those without any interpretation. Even though the famous Gompertz model has some behavioural interpretation it suffers from other drawbacks. In the present work, we propose a new fertility model , which has its genesis in the generalization of logistic law. The proposed model has good behavioral interpretation, alongside having nice parameter interpretations.

We investigate the causal effect of a woman’s years of schooling on giving birth while a teenager using a major educational policy change in Ethiopia in 1994 that abolished school fees. We find that the policy change was associated with a jump in school attendance with women who reached school starting age just after the policy was introduced achieving around 1.3 years of additional education, on average, compared to women who just missed the policy. Using a regression discontinuity approach we find that each additional year of schooling due to the policy lowers the probability of giving birth before age twenty by about 6 percentage points (from a baseline of about 54%). This implies that completing lower primary school (4 years of schooling) reduces the probability of a teenage birth by 0.24. We show that the decline in teen fertility with schooling can be explained by a decline of similar magnitude in the probability that the more educated women are married before age twenty, though there is a somewhat lower decline in the number of educated women reporting that their age at first sex is before age twenty.

The Southeast Asian countries are at different stages of demographic transition. Within each country, fertility level varies widely across the socioeconomic groups, resulting from differentials in age at marriage, contraceptive use, and probably induced abortion. This paper attempts to examine factors influencing the fertility trends and differentials in Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines.
The near replacement fertility level achieved in Indonesia and rapid fertility transition in Cambodia were mainly attributed to the successful implementation of national family planning program. The pace of fertility reduction in the Philippines has been relatively modest, partly due to the low use of modern contraception. While rising age at marriage is an important proximate determinant of fertility in each of these countries, it is less important in explaining the different level of fertility across the three countries since the singulate mean age at marriage is about the same in all three countries (about 23 years around year 2005).
Urbanization, social changes and wider use of contraception have resulted in continuing fertility decline in these countries. However, improving women’s education and status is crucial in reducing the high fertility level among some groups of the population, in order to achieve greater economic progress.

Numerous states in India now exhibit sub-replacement fertility. In consequence, as elsewhere in East Asia, one-child-families must be in evidence in India. Very little work has been done so far on identifying and examining one child families in India (cf Basu and Desai 2010).
In this paper, we examine data regarding planned fertility and fertility ideals in the National Family Health Survey [NFHS-III], 2005-06. We found that only about 3% of families are one child families, and that two-thirds of these one child families are one son families. However, a large proportion of never married women and men who are mostly below age 30 desire small families with only one child. Indeed, one in every six never married women and one in every seven never married men report a preference for a one child family, with most of not particular about sex of the child. We found a high correlation between ideal family size of one and one child family outcomes, which implies that once these surveyed never married women/men marry and enter the reproductive span, we may find a sizeable increase in the number of one child families. We suggest this could be a useful input into forecasting fertility in Indian states.

The aim of this paper is to examine the nature of relationship of fertility and poverty reduction in districts of India. Data from multiple sources; the census of India, 1991, 2001 and 2011, the District Level Household Survey 2004-05 and 2007-08 and the National sample Survey, 1993-94, 2004-05 and 2009-10 is used in the analyses. The district is the unit of analyses and data on demographic, social and economic dimensions of 640 districts are derived at three point of time. The relationship of fertility transition and money metric poverty is examined using the descriptive statistics, ordinary least square and the fixed effect and random effect model.
Results indicates that fertility transition is a significant determinant of poverty reduction in districts of India. A 10% reduction in fertility leads to 7% reduction in poverty controlling for economic growth, state domestic product percapita and fiscal deficit. The other significant predictors of poverty reduction are use of modern method of contraception, female literacy, percentage of laborer households and the region. On the other hand, the relationship of poverty and TFR is becoming weak over time. While female literacy, hospital based delivery and sterilization are negative and significantly related with TFR, the level of poverty is not significant related to fertility

Caesarean delivery has been increasing world-wide raising the question of the appropriateness of the selection of delivery for the caesarean procedure. This increasing trend of caesarean delivery in India attracts researchers to study its correlates. In this paper an attempt has been made to examine the relationship between risks of caesarean delivery with female’s pre-pregnancy obesity, delivery complications and socio-demographic variables using NFHS-III data for Uttar Pradesh the most populous state of India. The increase in caesarean section cannot be attributed entirely to the rise in institutional deliveries alone because it was observed a strong association between caesarean sections and private sector institutions. The risk of undergoing caesarean section in the private sector is about three times higher than that in the public sector. It is worthwhile mention that the study clearly shows that the risk of caesarean delivery is four times higher in obese women in comparison with non obese women. The younger and educated women are more likely to prefer caesarean delivery as compared to their counterparts. It might be possible that this surgical procedure is being misused for profit purposes in the private sector or being deliberate choice of female to avoid labor pain.