Degree Of Preference Implementation And Fertility Changes In Developing Countries

Abstract

The 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo emphasized ‘the right of men and women to be informed and to have access to safe, effective, affordable and acceptable methods of family planning of their choice, as well as other methods of their choice for regulation of fertility which are not against the law’. These rights rest on the recognition of the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children. Thus, various national governments have demonstrated their support for these resolutions by promoting contraceptive use in many ways. However, the question remains as to what extent couples have been able to implement their fertility desires. The need therefore exists to examine the extent to which observed changes in fertility in developing countries can be explained by the ability of individuals or couples to implement their fertility desires through informed choice of family planning methods In this study, we applied Bongaarts variant of Easterlin’s supply-demand framework for the analysis of fertility to the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data from sixty developing countries to estimate the level of preference implementation. Decomposition of the determinants of fertility was done using 27 of the 60 countries, which has data sets before and after the 1994 ICPD. The regression of preference implementation on the 1998 United Nations Human Development Index was also done to establish the relationship between the two. The result shows variation in the values of preference implementation especially between the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and others. It is shown that the attainment of couple’s fertility preference is quite low in SSA. The decomposition procedure shows that preference implementation is a more important determinant of fertility decline than wanted fertility. The importance of the degree of preference implementation and the implication of this finding is discussed. The need for further investigation into the use of degree of preference implementation in demographic research is emphasized.