Critical Perspectives on Schooling and Fertility in the Developing World (1999) / Chapter Skim
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8 Excess Fertility, Unintended Births, and Children's Schooling
8 Excess Fertility, Unintended Births, and Children's Schooling
Pages 216-266
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From page 216... ...
We show that in two of the four countries studied the Dominican Republic and the Philippines unintended and excess fertility have sizeable negative impacts on children's schooling. In the other two countries Kenya and Egypt we do not find such effects.
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From page 217... ...
The next section provides a conceptual overview of the linkages among family size, excess fertility and unintended births, and human capital investments in children. It also reviews the rather meager literature that has addressed such questions.
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From page 218... ...
If the benefits of schooling are substantial, then it is the former situation, with parents responsible for the money costs of schooling, in which one would expect a negative association between fertility and children's education to emerge. Finally, in family systems involving sibling chains of support or child fostering, parents can distribute the costs of schooling and childrearing among a network of relatives, thereby escaping the constraints imposed by their individual family budgets.
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From page 219... ...
. Now suppose an unintended birth occurs, so that family size exceeds the optimal value N*
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From page 220... ...
The coefficient ~ associated with U thus measures the direct consequences of unintended fertility for children's schooling.3 The set of other covariates X includes all exogenous factors (such as income Q) that affect the desired level of schooling S*
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From page 221... ...
and N2* may have been fully desired at the time of their conception, later events may bring about revisions in desired family size and force a rethinking of educational investments.
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From page 222... ...
Relatively few efforts have been made to distinguish intended from unintended births, as it has been assumed, quite plausibly, that the great majority of teen births in the United States are unintended. A handful of studies in a variety of settings have documented negative effects for unwanted children, whether in terms of heightened mortality risks (Frenzen and Hogan, 1982, for Thailand)
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From page 223... ...
Fertility In these four countries, total fertility rates (TFRs) for the 3 years before the respective DHS survey dates range from a low of 3.7 in the Dominican Republic to a high of 5.2 in Kenya, with the TFR for the Philippines being 4.1 and that for Egypt 4.7.
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From page 224... ...
If a woman said she wanted the birth later, she was asked how much longer she would like to have waited.8 These retrospective data provide the basis for our measures of unintended fertility. The measurement of excess fertility is based on the difference between cumulative fertility and the woman's report of her ideal family size, both being measured at the date of the survey.
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From page 225... ...
063 41 48 61 121 30 27 21 213 22 21 14 3 7 Of women with births in last 5 years At least 1 unwanted birth At least 1 unwanted or mistimed by more than 2 years For all women, ideal family size and fertility Number of births at survey > Ideal family size Surviving children at survey > Ideal family size 4 4 18 28 20 21 28 n.a.
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From page 226... ...
A reduction in the years of primary schooling in Egypt from 6 to 5 years came in 1989, the year after the 1988 DHS was conducted, thus allowing us to use the old system to analyze the full sample of children. Recent changes in the Dominican Republic's system have not been fully implemented, and it appears that two parallel systems are currently in place: the traditional system had an intermediate phase of 2 years before full secondary, whereas the reform plan has 4 years of secondary following 6 years of primary, with two additional years for university-bound students.
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From page 227... ...
227 Cal a' o VO o a' Cq VO o .~ C)
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From page 228... ...
Six grades of primary schooling characterize all the school systems except that of Kenya, where primary school lasts 8 years. Neither the Dominican Republic nor the Philippines imposes national exams during the primary and secondary years; to determine pass rates, they rely instead on internal exams administered separately within each school.
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From page 229... ...
By contrast, late entry is evidently common in the Dominican Republic, with children behind grade representing almost half of all enrolled students aged 11-16. Table 8-4 shows the distribution of children in each of our samples by educational status at the time of the survey and summarizes their performance on pleted is less than the number of years that would have been completed if they had started school within 2 years of the recommended starting age in the country according to UNESCO (1994)
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From page 230... ...
230 100 c~ 50 O 100 o 1 501 0q EXCESS FERTILE Y UNITENDED BIRTHS, AND SCHOOLING KENYA 6 7 8 6 7 8 ~1n Okay 9 10 Okay 11 1~ Child's ace Behind Ft-,YPT 1n 14 Dropped 11 12 13 14 Child's age Behind Dropped 15 16 17 18 Never 15 16 17 18 Never FIGURE 8-la Children's educational progress by age in Kenya and Egypt (enrollment in preschool not included)
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From page 231... ...
MONTGOMERY AND CYNTHIA B LLOYD 100 ' 50 o Okay 100 c~ ' 50 o 231 DOMINICAN REPUBLIC 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 Child's age Behind PHILIPPINES Dropped ~ Never 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 Child's age Okay Behind Dropped ~ Never FIGURE 8-lb Children's educational progress by age in the Dominican Republic and the Philippines (enrollment in preschool not included)
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From page 232... ...
: 1 unwanted sibling born in last 5 years9221715 2 or more unwanted siblings born in last 5 years3874 At least 1 sibling unwanted or mistimed by more than 2 years14363827 In family with excess fertility57837253 aAge range 7-18 for the Dominican Republic and the Philippines, 6-18 for Egypt and Kenya. bAge groups: 14 and above for the Dominican Republic and the Philippines, 13 and above for Egypt, 15 and above for Kenya.
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From page 233... ...
Note that the general rankings of the study countries resemble those shown in the previous tables, with the Dominican Republic and the Philippines having the lowest levels of both unintended and excess fertility and Kenya and Egypt the highest. In all four countries, well over 50 percent of school-age children reside in families with excess fertility.
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From page 234... ...
As just mentioned, the family planning access measures are excluded from Xi. The schooling propensity for child i has an observed counterpart in either a binary indicator of school enrollment or an ordered index of educational attainment.
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From page 235... ...
l I Current ^k Educational ~ Status at T 1 ~, l educational consequences of unintended fertility using DHS data, we are necessarily considering cross-sibling effects. For both children, these potentially negative consequences can be summarized only using the educational status data gathered at the time of the DHS survey, which reflect the cumulative effects of delays in school entry, repetition of grades, temporary withdrawal, and premature dropout up to the time of the survey.
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From page 236... ...
Of course, the mother is not asked to single out and thereby label child 2 in her survey response on ideal family size. If child 2 is old enough to have attended school as of the survey date this is the case shown in the figure the educational consequences of excess fertility may be evident for both children.
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From page 237... ...
the presence of excess fertility, defined earlier as having more births at the survey than the ideal family size reported by the woman. Many alternative measures and combinations of measures, including interactions with the child's sex, were examined in 18In specifying the full system, we should in principle allow for additional family-level effects that induce a correlation in educational outcomes among children.
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From page 238... ...
The lower end of this age range is defined such that given first entry to primary school at the appropriate starting age and steady progression thereafter from grade to grade, the first year of secondary school should have been completed. Incidence of Unintended and Excess Fertility Given that the fertility equation of our system is estimated with three dependent variables for four countries, we choose to present here a summary qualitative assessment of the findings rather than the extensive details.
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From page 239... ...
Kenya provides the exception to the rule, and we find this exception intriguing. It may be that the Kenyan woman who labels a particular conception as unwanted or who says that her current number of children is greater than her ideal is in some respects atypical in a social setting that has historically emphasized spacing rather than numbers as the key dimension of fertility control.
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From page 240... ...
These effects are summarized in two ways: first with respect to an index of the number of grades of schooling completed, and second with an analysis that focuses on attainment of at least 1 year of secondary schooling for children in the relevant age range. The first analysis is conducted using the method of ordered probit, which, as will be shown, allows us to capture the main features of the distribution of completed schooling; the secondary schooling analysis employs simple probits.
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From page 241... ...
, community-level measures of travel time to the nearest primary and secondary school are available. In some cases, the community informant could not supply an estimate (this occurred for both primary and secondary schooling in the Philippines and for secondary schooling in the Dominican Republic and Egypt)
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From page 242... ...
(-1.01) Spouse, primary schoolingn.a.n.a.
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From page 244... ...
n.a. school known Secondary travel time (minutes)
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From page 246... ...
The point applies better to the case of the Dominican Republic, where some 34 percent of women use modern contraceptive methods, than to the case of the Philippines, in which only 15 percent use such methods. Second, it is reasonable to expect that the disruption occasioned by an unintended birth may be greater where three conditions obtain: the returns to education are perceived to be considerable, the (direct)
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From page 247... ...
To understand the figures, it may be helpful to focus attention on grade 6, which is the end of primary schooling in the Dominican Republic. The predicted proportion of children achieving at least this level of schooling is .56 in the case of no unwanted births, .48 in the case of one unwanted birth, and just .39 in the (extreme)
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From page 248... ...
-.259* .031 -.088 Ideal family size at (-6~87)
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From page 249... ...
This phase of the fertility transition is exemplified by the cases of the Philippines and the Dominican Republic, where the TFR lies between 3.7 and 4.1. The full extent of these effects cannot be estimated with DHS data given the 5-year window of observation.
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From page 250... ...
\ \ . \ \\.~ it.\ ~ - ~,~ 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 , ~ ~1 1 1 , 1 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 Completed years of schooling FIGURE 8-4 Unwanted fertility and completed schooling: Dominican Republic estimates.
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From page 251... ...
Access to family planning services for women of all socioeconomic levels is important, and our findings underscore the continuing need for investment in family planning services for the disadvantaged. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Rockefeller Foundation through its grant to the Population Council, "Interrelationships Between Fertility and Child Investment: New Research Frontiers." Edmundo Paredes and Jie Wang provided invaluable research assistance throughout the project.
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From page 252... ...
Lin 1982 Transitions in the effect of family size on female educational attainment: The case of Taiwan. Comparative Education Review 26(2)
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From page 253... ...
Jain, and M Garate 1995 Meeting Reproductive Goals: The Impact of the Quality of Family Planning Services on Unintended Pregnancy in Peru.
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From page 254... ...
Moreno 1990 Dominican Republic Experimental Study: An Evaluation of Fertility and Child Health Information. Columbia, Md.: Institute for Research Development/Macro Systems, Inc.
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From page 255... ...
Perhaps the principal benefit is in showing that parental desires as expressed in their wanted fertility levels, their desired pattern of educational investments in children, and their preferred level of own consumption are jointly determined by a common set of exogenous factors. These factors include the level of parental income, the prices and related resource constraints parents face, and the fixed features of parental preferences.
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From page 256... ...
The parameter p of this subutility function serves to index the degree of parental aversion to inequality in the distribution of resources among their children. It ranges from -A to 1, with the case of p = 1 representing no aversion to inequality and, at the opposite end, the case of p ~ ~ representing no tolerance of inequality, that is, Leontief preferences.
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From page 257... ...
The full parental utility function is therefore a composite in which a CES factor, having to do with child services, is nested within a Cobb-Douglas function in which the two arguments are the child services aggregate U and parental consumption C The budget constraint for this problem allows for both discretionary and exogenous components of expenditure on children.
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From page 258... ...
We refer to this as the schooling demand equation, where by demand we mean demand that is conditional on a particular fertility level n. The conditional indirect utility derived from child services is then ~ -l/r U (n)
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From page 259... ...
Parental Responses to Unwanted Fertility The conceptual approach developed here can be used to study the consequences of unwanted fertility for parental consumption and children's educational investments. As above, let n*
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From page 260... ...
. It is possible to calculate the required compensation by using the conditional indirect utility function V*
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From page 261... ...
Rationalization is a potential problem when respondents who already have children are asked questions about desired or ideal family size or about the unwanted status of specific surviving children (McClelland, 1983~. In particular, the questions on unintended fertility are asked on a child-by-child basis, and in answering them, the woman may feel that she is being required, in effect, to affix a label to each child.
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From page 262... ...
A woman's desire for children, as expressed in her ideal family size, can be altered by changes in economic, marital, or health circumstances, or by the receipt of new information or knowledge, even if her underlying preferences are held constant (McClelland, 1983~. Thus a woman could report her last birth as being wanted at the time of conception and during the same survey interview report excess fertility in the present.
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From page 263... ...
MONTGOMERY AND CYNTHIA B LLOYD 263 measures of unwanted fertility reported elsewhere in the literature are not based on reports on the wantedness status of particular births, but rather on measures of ideal family size (Lightbourne, 1985)
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From page 265... ...
MONTGOMERY AND CYNTHIA B LLOYD APPENDIX C Endogeneity Tests Using Generalized Residuals in Schooling Equations 265 Measure of Unwantedness x2 on family planning access .
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From page 266... ...
Generalized residual coefficient, years equation (z stat.) Generalized residual coefficient, secondary school equation (z stat.)
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