Socioeconomic Development, Status of Women, Family Planning and Fertility in Rural and Urban Bangladesh Revisited

This paper examines the impacts of socioeconomic development, status of women and family planning on contraceptive practice and the extent to which these effects vary among rural and urban areas in Bangladesh. The Logit model will be used to evaluate the effects of a selected group of variables on the probability of reproductive behavior of rural and urban women in Bangladesh. By comparing the reproductive behavior of the rural women to those of urban women, we will be able to discern whether these differences can be explained by differing compositional characteristics with respect to socioeconomic development and status of women in rural and urban populations. We will also be able to establish whether the differences in reproductive behavior of rural and urban women are diverging, converging or remaining the same. Decomposition techniques will also be used to delineate factors that may have contributed to the observed rural-urban differences in reproductive behavior in Bangladesh.