Günther Isabel, Harttgen Kenneth
Center for Development and Cooperation, ETH Zurich, Clausiusstrasse 37, 8092, Zurich, Switzerland.
Demography. 2016 Feb;53(1):55-83. doi: 10.1007/s13524-015-0451-9.
Economists have often argued that high fertility rates are mainly driven by women's demand for children (and not by family planning efforts) with low levels of unwanted fertility across countries (and hence with little room for family planning efforts to reduce population growth). We study the relationship between wanted fertility and number of children born in a panel of 200 country-years controlling for country fixed effects and global time trends. In general, we find a close relationship between wanted and actual fertility, with one desired child leading to one additional birth. However, our results also indicate that in the last 20 years, the level of unwanted births has stayed at 2 across African countries but has, on average, decreased from 1 to close to 0 in other developing countries. Hence, women in African countries are less able to translate child preferences into birth outcomes than women in other developing countries, and forces other than fertility demand have been important for previous fertility declines in many developing countries. Family planning efforts only partially explain the observed temporal and spatial differences in achieving desired fertility levels.
经济学家们常常认为，高生育率主要是由女性对孩子的需求驱动的（而非计划生育措施），各国意外生育率较低（因此计划生育措施在降低人口增长方面的空间不大）。我们在一个包含200个国家年份的面板数据中，控制国家固定效应和全球时间趋势，研究理想生育率与生育子女数量之间的关系。总体而言，我们发现理想生育率与实际生育率之间存在密切关系，即想要一个孩子会导致多生育一个孩子。然而，我们的结果还表明，在过去20年里，非洲国家的意外生育率一直维持在2，但在其他发展中国家，这一数字平均已从1降至接近0。因此，与其他发展中国家的女性相比，非洲国家的女性更难将生育偏好转化为生育结果，而且除生育需求之外的其他因素对许多发展中国家此前的生育率下降起到了重要作用。计划生育措施只能部分解释在实现理想生育率水平方面所观察到的时间和空间差异。
