Socioeconomic differentials in fertility and family formation

This paper provides research-based evidence to examine the association between family formation, fertility transition, and cultural changes from a demographic perspective. The evidence of this paper is obtained from a country at which one of the most spectacular falls in birth rate ever experienced in human history has occurred: Iran. The country's fundamental socio-cultural changes over the past decades have made it as a unique ‘human and social laboratory’ to survey their consequences on family formation characteristics such as marriage and fertility patterns. As this paper analyses family formation characteristics in the varying socio-cultural circumstances, it also provides evidence for the long-standing debate as to whether culture and religion itself or other factors explain family formation characteristics (such as early marriage, high incidence of marriage and high fertility for women) in these sorts of religious and cultural contexts.

India provides a terrain ground for investigating the long-term dynamics of fertility change for several reasons. First, it has a unique history of early family planning activities that emerged during the 10960s. Second, it has recently witnessed a rapid economic expansion likely to accelerate the pace of demographic transformations and to reshape its geography. Finally, it is a highly heterogeneous country characterized by a complex sociocultural and religious geography compared to other large countries like China, Brazil or Russia. Using original subregional fertility levels, we will reconstruct fertility change over the last five decades in the country and examine their changing spatial and demographic patterns. In addition, we will also compare India’s pace of fertility decline with trends observed elsewhere in Asia.
This paper aims at probing India’s fertility trends from both internal and external perspectives in order to answer two main sets of questions: Is India’s fertility transition typical of Asia or has it proceeded at a slower pace than elsewhere? Have fertility trends been parallel within India over the last decades? Can we identify distinct regional trajectories? How far have the conditions of the onset of fertility decline in each region determined its course during the following decades?

Fertility transformations observed since the early 1990s and their determinants have been rather thoroughly investigated in Lithuania. There are fairly numerous national and international studies devoted to this topic, mainly based on survey data. However, none of these studies looks into the effect of ethnicity on fertility. It is, to a large extent, caused by limitations of sample survey data. Lithuania is relatively homogeneous by its ethnic composition: Lithuanians constitute more than 80 percent of the total population and the shares of other ethnicities are rather small. This study uses a unique census-linked dataset, based on all records from the 2001 census and all birth records for the period between April 6, 2001 and December 31, 2002. The preliminary findings suggest that ethnicity is an important gradient of fertility in Lithuania. Lithuanians have higher fertility than other ethnic groups, especially Russians. The lowest TFR found in the Russian ethnic group is mainly explained by lower rates of second births. Interestingly, the highest mean age at second birth is also found in the Russian subpopulation. Fertility of Lithuanians remains significantly higher even after controlling for compositional differences by education, urban-rural residence, marital status, and economic activity status.

China’s sex ratio at birth has decreased slowly since 2009. Investigation of household-level influences on the desired number and gender of the family’s children can help produce more effective governance policies. A framework for analysis of families’ sex selection and fertility behavior is proposed. Data from the 1‰ sample of the sixth census of China completed in 2011 are used to investigate factors influencing the reproductive behavior of Chinese families with ordinary logistic regression and multiple hierarchical logistic regression. It is found that the probability of having a son is correlated with the mother’s personal characteristics, family structural variables, and marriage pattern. The parity of a son’s birth is positively correlated with the number of daughters previously born and negatively correlated with the number of previously born sons. Increasing China's urbanization and industrialization is likely to have more influence on families’ reproductive decision-making than simply increasing the GDP per capita.

This paper, among the first, dynamically estimates the effects of China’s family planning policy on fertility with a micro-level panel data, transformed from the cross-sectional birth history data of the China Health and Nutrition Survey. This paper applies a mixed proportional hazard duration model where the unobserved individual heterogeneity is non-parametrically specified, recommended by Heckman and Singer (1984), and extends the improved policy measures from Wang (2012)’s static analysis to dynamic analysis. It’s found that, the one-child policy, the most recent and ongoing period of China’s policies, has remarkably negative effects on the probabilities of having the second and third child, but shows little impact for other birth orders. The effects of earlier periods of policies are simply trivial through all birth orders. Therefore, family planning policies didn’t play a major role in China’s fertility transition which mainly happened before the one-child policy period. Further, a more-educated woman tends to respond to policy shocks at lower birth orders in contrast to a less-educated woman, because the former desires a smaller family. Moreover, the model without heterogeneity would strikingly overestimate the policy effects and a parametric heterogeneity might also bias the estimation.

This paper shows the relationship between socio-economic status and fertility behavior in a rural African setting. We combine a quasi-experimental introduction of family planning services in the Kassena-Nankana districts of Ghana with longitudinal data to estimate the impact of socio-economic status (measured by woman’s education, her husband’s education and wealth) on fertility preferences, regulation and outcomes. We track the fertility behavior and outcomes of more than 24,000 women in their reproductive age (15-49) over a period of eighteen years. Our results show that, before the interventions, educated women did not have significantly fewer children, but desired lower family sizes and were more likely to use modern contraceptives. However, husband’s education was associated with lower fertility especially when their wives were also educated. Wealth is associated with higher births, reflecting a higher child survival rate in wealthy families. The family planning interventions affected both educated and uneducated women but the effect on educated women stronger, leading to the emergence of an education-fertility differential 17 years. Our results suggest that in settings where men dominate reproductive decision-making, their education status may have a stronger effect on fertility than the educational attainment of women.

Using harmonised retrospective fertility and union histories from a set of nationally representative surveys from 14 European countries and the United States (the Harmonized Histories), I study how the influence of educational attainment on partnership and family formation transitions changes over the life course. Previous research is limited to either examining this influence for a very specific segment of the family life course or by only investigating single or competing transitions. By applying multistate event history models, I provide an innovative approach to understand the changing role of education over the family life course. This approach enables me to disentangle the influence of education on each and every partnership and family formation transition. As these influences come from the same model, they are directly comparable. This allows me to assess whether the influence of education changes over the family life course. I compare and contrast the results in a cross-national context for women born between 1950 and 1979.

The aim of the study is to investigate union formation around year 2000. The data used is based on information from the Swedish Total Population Register and covers the about 30 000 couples that had their first biological child in 2000. The couples are followed from the day that they started living together to a possible separation or the end of 2010. The couple is assumed to live together if both partners are registered in the same dwelling unit. In the study different events of family formation are studied, moving in together, getting married, and having the first and possibly more children. The timing and occurrence of these events are compared between couples with different level of education and between couples born in or outside of Sweden. Comparisons are also made with respect to the couples’ age and age difference. Results show for example that although a majority of the couples have their first child as a cohabiting couple, eventually most couples do get married. The propensity to marry is higher for highly educated couples and for couples where one or both partners are born outside Sweden.

The study tries to explore how age at first marriage and actual number of children are influenced by socio-economic factors and contraceptive use and discussion with family planning workers. The study included 134 married male and female respondents and used multiple regression analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis for justifying hypotheses. Findings of the study show that female got married and give birth of their first child at their early age (below 18 years). And people who had very low years of schooling have high preference to have more children and they get married at their very early age. However actual high actual number of children and low age at first marriage is found for Muslim people compared with Hindu people. And people who ever used contraception and did not use contraception at current and did not discuss with the health workers were married below 18 years, very low level of education and more than four actual numbers of children. That indicates that people’s fertility behavior in vulnerable area for climate change will have significant influences on delaying population stabilization and adding more populations at national level.

Morocco has significantly improved health conditions of its children. Child mortality decreased constantly and Morocco is on the track to achieve the fourth MDG. However, improvement was not equally shared by groups from different milieu, regions and/or level of education and wealth.
Rural children are more likely to suffer from stunting, wasting and underweight compared to urban children. Moreover, the gaps persisted and sometimes increased during the last two decades. For instance, the national percentage of stunted children decreased from 22.6% in 1992 to 14.9 % in 2011 but the rural-urban ratio increased from 2.1 to 2.4.
Between 1992 and 2011, neonatal, postnatal, infant and under five mortality rates decreased but rural-urban ratios remained of the same order.
Neonatal, post-neonatal, infant and child mortality all show differences by gender, mother’s education level and wealth quintile.
Children born to an illiterate woman are at least twice as likely to die as their counterparts born to a woman with secondary or higher level of education. The ratio reaches 3 for post-neonatal mortality.
A child born in the poorest wealth quintile is three times more likely to die before his or her fifth birthday compared to a child born in the richest quintile.