Posted on 04/21/2023 3:56:59 AM PDT by Cronos
ABSTRACT:
Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest countries, has experienced a dramatic decline in fertility since 1985, with a decline in the total fertility rate from 5.5–2.1. International researchers have debated the reasons for this rapid decline, with some studies attributing it primarily to family planning programmes and others pointing at the simultaneous increase in the education of women and other socioeconomic factors. Using data from seven-rounds of the Bangladesh Demographic Health Survey (BDHS), we comprehensively review fertility trends by reconstructing cohort and period fertility indicators by educational attainment. Multilevel regression shows a robust negative association between fertility and educational attainment at the individual and community levels. Pathway’s analysis reveals that female education has a significant effect on declining fertility desires dominating all other effects. Increased women's education and the associated diffusion of smaller desired family size might be the primary factor driving the impressive fertility decline in Bangladesh.
1. Introduction
Bangladesh is a prominent country of study for demographers wanting to demonstrate the effectiveness of family planning programmes. One of the world’s poorest countries, it has experienced a steep decline in fertility; from a total fertility rate (TFR) of 5.5 in 1985, to 3.7 in 1995, to 2.1 in 2017 (The World Bank, Citation2019). Given the concentrated efforts at family planning and the low economic development over these years, studying Bangladesh seems like a sort of natural experiment that can help isolate the effects of these two possible drivers of the decline in fertility, which in many other countries tend to change together. A recent prominent paper on population growth and climate change (Bongaarts & O’Neill, Citation2018) singled out Bangladesh as an example that family planning programmes work and are effective at kerbing population growth.
However, a closer look at the available data and in-depth studies of the drivers of the decline in fertility in Bangladesh reveals that the evidence for this strong claim is surprisingly fragmentary. In particular, the educational attainment of women of reproductive age has increased roughly in parallel with a decline in the birth rate. Figure 1 illustrates this with age and education pyramids for the years 1985 and 2015. The figure shows the change from a very large proportion of children together with the majority of women of reproductive age having no education at all (dark red) to the majority of women having a primary education or higher at the bottom of the pyramid. More than half of the youngest cohorts even have a secondary education, as we discuss later. Many other studies also point to the important role of education in the decline in fertility in Bangladesh.
Figure 1. Population pyramids (in millions) with medium SSP2 scenario by education for (a) 1985 and (b) 2015, Bangladesh Source: Wittgenstein Centre (Citation2018)
ote: The population component of SSP2 is a middle-of-the-road scenario that can be seen as the most likely path for a country. It combines medium fertility with medium mortality, medium migration, and the Global Education Trend education scenario.
2. Fertility trends in Bangladesh
The rapid decline in fertility in Bangladesh since 1980 has caught the attention of international researchers and policymakers for several reasons. First, Bangladesh was one of the world’s poorest countries when it experienced the steep decline in TFR. Until 1980, Bangladesh had a higher fertility rate than most other countries in South Asia (see Figure 2), but after that it experienced a more rapid decline than the other countries. Second, as a rare exception in the history of fertility transitions worldwide, the decline in fertility in Bangladesh began at a relatively high level of under-5 mortality. It was still above 200 per 1,000 births in 1975–1980, which means that 1 out of 5 children died before reaching age 5. Finally, Bangladesh underwent a substantial socioeconomic transformation when fertility started falling, triggering efforts by researchers to disentangle the drivers of and better understand the demographic transition, to ultimately apply their findings in high-fertility countries.
Figure 2. Trends in fertility estimates for South Asian countries according to UN-WPP Source: United Nations (Citation2019).
Somewhere in the world, Paul Ehrlich is smiling.
As are scores of anti-family environmentalists.
And not a shot was fired.
Wealth, fertility and adaptive behaviour in industrial populations
In decreasing order of strength, fertility (TFR) correlates negatively with education, CPR, and GDP per capita, and positively with religiosity. Europe deviates from other regions in several ways, e.g. TFR increases with education and decreases with religiosity in W Europe. TFR decreases with increasing strength of family planning programs in three regions, but only weakly so in a fourth, Sub-Saharan Africa (the two European regions lacked such programs). Most factors correlated with TFR are also correlated with each other. In particular, education correlates positively with GDP per capita but negatively with religiosity, which is also negatively related to contraception and GDP per capita.
https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-020-8331-7
People and economies will prosper if policymakers help women combine career and family
Economists have proposed two main explanations.
The first is known as the quantity-quality trade-off. It suggests that as parents get richer, they invest more in the “quality” (for example, education) of their children. This investment is costly, so parents choose to have fewer children as incomes rise. Historically fertility and GDP per capita are strongly negatively related, both across countries and over time.
The second explanation acknowledges how time-consuming it is to raise children. As wages increase, devoting time to childcare—time that could otherwise be spent working—becomes more costly for parents, and especially for mothers. The result is a decline in fertility and greater female labor force participation. There is in fact historically a strong negative association between female labor force participation and fertility over time and across countries.
New fertility facts
The data show that these relationships are no longer universally true.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4822433/
Then we have China...
Just allow and infect every known sexual deviency.
At least, in part, you shorten the fertility of a woman when you have her go to school. She can no longer get pregnant at 14, if she is getting a high school education.
Pushing people to wait until they are 30 years of age in the Western world is a big contributor why our birth rate is below replacement level. You are shortening a women’s fertility level to about 5 years before she declines sharply.
It seems that 1985 is a bit early for Bill Gates to have started any of his vaccination programs in 3rd world countries.
no 14 year old should skip an education just so she can have more babies. Especially in a third world country where she won’t be able to feed them.
I’m not saying it should be any other way. I’m simply explaining why education may result in less fertility. It takes the time away that would otherwise be available to have children. Im not saying it shouldnt be that way.
okay thanks. Cause, no.
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