Fertility, child work, and schooling consequences of family planning programs: evidence from an experiment in rural Bangladesh
Sinha, N.
Economic Development and Cultural Change 54(1): 97-128
2005
ISSN/ISBN: 0013-0079 DOI: 10.1086/431259Document Number: 336013
This paper evaluates the impact (on women's cumulative fertility, and on boys' and girls' labour force participation and school enrolment) of a family planning programme experiment introduced in 1978 by the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in rural Matlab subdistrict, Bangladesh. The impact of the Matlab programme is estimated using data from the 1996 Matlab Health and Socioeconomic Survey, which surveyed 4364 households residing in 141 villages in the surveillance area covering both treatment and control villages. It is revealed that the Matlab programme reduced fertility in the treatment villages. The estimates show that 18 years after the programme was introduced, the mean lifetime fertility of the women who received the programme was 0.60 births below that of women who did not receive the programme. This translates into a reduction in lifetime fertility of about 14%. A mother's exposure to the Matlab programme does not appear to have had a statistically significant impact on children's schooling. However, the results indicate that, by influencing the mother's fertility, the programme influenced the labour force participation of her children. While the impact on girl's labour force participation is statistically not significant, the impact on boys' labour force participation is significant and implies that the programme raised boys' labour force participation by 13%.