Maitra Pushkar
Department of Economics, Monash University, Clayton Campus, VIC 3800, Australia.
J Health Popul Nutr. 2004 Mar;22(1):84-96.
In societies where childbearing prior to marriage is not socially acceptable, postponement of marriage contributes significantly to a reduction in fertility level by shortening the total reproductive life of women. This, in turn, reduces the number of children a woman is likely to have and has a negative impact on the population growth rate of a country. This paper examined the effect of socioeconomic characteristics on age at marriage and on total fertility rates in Nepal using a household-level dataset. The estimated results showed that an increase in age at marriage significantly reduced total fertility of women. An increase in the number of children who died had a statistically significant effect on total fertility (child replacement effect). The estimation results also emphasized the role of female education in reducing total fertility and increasing age at marriage. Moreover, female educational effect had a strong inter-generational effect on age at marriage, and this effect was stronger than the effect of male educational attainment. One implication of these results is that from the policy point of view, all other things being equal, governments should accord a significant priority to female education and, in particular, a higher priority compared to male schooling.
在婚前生育不被社会接受的社会中，推迟结婚通过缩短女性的总生育寿命，对降低生育率有显著作用。这反过来又减少了女性可能生育的子女数量，并对一个国家的人口增长率产生负面影响。本文使用家庭层面的数据集，研究了社会经济特征对尼泊尔结婚年龄和总生育率的影响。估计结果表明，结婚年龄的增加显著降低了女性的总生育率。死亡子女数量的增加对总生育率有统计学上的显著影响（子女替代效应）。估计结果还强调了女性教育在降低总生育率和提高结婚年龄方面的作用。此外，女性教育效应在结婚年龄上有很强的代际效应，且这种效应比男性教育程度的效应更强。这些结果的一个启示是，从政策角度来看，在其他条件相同的情况下，政府应高度重视女性教育，特别是与男性教育相比给予更高的优先级。
