UW Statistics Doctoral Student Daphne Liu and CSDE Affiliate Adrian Raftery Co-author Study on Girls’ Education, Family Planning and Fertility
Posted: 9/15/2020 (CSDE Research)
UW Statistics Doctoral Student Daphne Liu and CSDE Affiliate Adrian Raftery recently published an article in Population and Development Review examining the impact of education and family planning on fertility decline. Employing a Granger-causality based regression approach, they assess three questions. Is increasing contraceptive use or reducing unmet need more effective in family planning? Is it the number of years women have attended school or current enrollments of children that influence fertility declines? And, which of these factors is most important in explaining fertility decline? Using a combination of the UN’s World Population Prospects data (WPP), the Wittgenstein harmonized education data, the World Bank’s education data, and the UN’s Estimates and Projections of Family Planning indicators for 201 countries from 1970-2015, Liu and Raftery’s study finds that women’s attainment of lower secondary education is one key to accelerating fertility decline, but contraceptive prevalence for modern methods has the strongest accelerating effect. Children’s enrollment levels have no impact on fertility declines.To read the article click here.