"Fertility as Mobility" in India: Salience of Education and Employment Opportunities

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.