Allowing fertility decline: 200 years after Malthus's essay on population.

• Author: Abernethy, Virginia Deane
• Position: Symposium on Population Law

1. INTRODUCTION

   Currently, fertility rates are declining or are already low in most countries.(1) The economic opportunity model presented herein predicts that this trend will continue because it is a response to real economic and environmental signs. The fertility decline can be delayed by either lavish foreign aid or attractive migration opportunities, because these harbingers of opportunity neutralize local signals of scarcity.

   Well-meaning environmentalists regard explosive population growth as an enduring dilemma. The frequent target of interventions to stop population growth is the total fertility rate (TFR), an estimate of the number of children to be born to a woman over her lifetime. Here, I propose an economic opportunity model of fertility, to explain why fertility rates rise or fall. This model puts much new data in perspective.

   The economic opportunity model holds that a sense of environmental and economic limits motivates couples to prefer and plan small families. The positive, motivational role for perceived limits may appear to fly in the face of both humanitarian goals for world-wide improvement in the standard of living and the neoclassical value system which equates growth with well-being. The model also raises the concern that it is coercive to let hardship influence behavior. Thus, I pose two questions. First, is the economic opportunity model of fertility empirically correct? Assuming yes, is the process coercive?

   A few words about coercion (words uninformed by legal precedent, I admit) may suffice to show that coercion does not apply to the operation of the economic opportunity model of fertility. Certain conditions must exist to create a coercive situation. To be coercive, a person or institution or the agent thereof (the first party) must make the target of behavior modification (the second party) aware of a specific link between his or her behavior and a reward or punishment controlled by the first party. If this link is not explicitly communicated and controlled by those desiring a particular behavioral outcome, coercion cannot exist. Acts of silence or omission, in and of themselves, are therefore not coercive. Complex environmental and economic processes also cannot be coercive. It follows that feedback from environmental and economic circumstances is not coercive.(2) While not coercive, signals from the economy and environment are, nevertheless, powerful motivators. Often they are effective inducements to act in a particular way. I turn now to their effect on fertility.

   The weight of expert opinion is on the side of choice and motivation, rather than contraceptive availability, as the key to family side.(3) World Bank analyst Lant Pritchett asserts that the number of children wanted explains 85-90% of the variance in family side.(4) However, a highly divisive but fundamental question remains: exactly what factors and incentives cause families to prefer a large, or small, number of children?

   Demographic transition theory (DTT) tells policymakers that economic development, low infant mortality, and education cause a preference for small family size. But this causal explanation arose from correlational data from the 1930s and reflected fertility during a period when western countries were sunk in economic depression. It has little other basis and has been contradicted by in-depth historical studies.(5) Moreover, accumulating data suggests that DTT variables have uncertain power to predict or cause fertility decline.(6) Nevertheless, DTT has been used to rationalize international programs designed to assist Third World development, an enterprise assumed to be not only humanitarian, but also effective for reducing fertility.

   I propose a different and much simpler explanation of family size preferences. The premise is that children are desirable among all peoples. It is no large leap to the hypothesis that families ordinarily want as many children as they believe they can successfully raise.

   Standards for success and opportunity vary across cultures and socioeconomic sectors; therefore, the following two causal principles of the economic opportunity model are phrased in terms of subjective perception. One, a sense of expanding opportunity causes families to raise their family size target; this usually results in larger actual family size. Two, a perception of scarcity, limits, or contracting opportunity leads to marital and reproductive caution, i.e., smaller family size.(7)

   The economic opportunity model of fertility suggests policies which are often diametrically opposed to those prescribed by demographic transition theory. For example, DTT is congruent with generous immigration policies and international economic development aid. But the economic opportunity model suggests that this open-handedness is often problematic, sending the message abroad that local constraints can be discounted because international wealth is abundant and opportunity is beckoning. If people believe that negative signals coming from their own environment and economy can be safely ignored, incentives to exercise marital and reproductive caution are overwhelmed.

2. PERCEIVED ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY AND FERTILITY

   Population experts compete for credit whenever fertility declines, but the field trying to account for fertility increases is nearly empty. A sound theory should explain and predict change in either direction, as the economic opportunity model does.

   The following summaries of recent studies show that perceptions of a changing opportunity structure precede fluctuations in fertility and support the economic opportunity model. The data includes controlled natural experiments which, in the social sciences, are often the only feasible approximation to hypothesis testing.

   1. Controlled Comparisons

      Control for cultural variables is achieved by focusing within one geographic area, particularly where societies have common religious or historical roots. These conditions are met within the Arabic-speaking, Muslim countries of the Middle East. Thus, comparisons among these countries provide strong tests of the demographic transition model and, alternately, the economic opportunity model.

      For instance, comparing Egypt with Morocco, Youssef Courbage declares that the DTT model predicts a faster fertility decline in Egypt than in Morocco. Courbage notes that considering

      land, economic indicators, standard of living, overall education, female

      education, gender inequity in education, and child labor-one would predict

      that Morocco would be at a disadvantage with respect to fertility decline.

      And yet the fertility decline in Morocco has been faster and more

      sustained than in Egypt.(8)

      Courbage also points out that since the mid-1970s, "Egyptian economic growth has been particularly rapid without bringing down fertility, while in Morocco slow economic growth and a decrease in fertility have gone hand in hand."(9) Drawing a conclusion congruent with the economic opportunity model, Courbage finds that Morocco was propelled into rapidly declining fertility by an export bust. Whereas phosphate exports were a source of wealth which had allowed the government to subsidize household consumption in the years since independence, a 47% drop in phosphate prices between 1975 and 1976 permanently changed that prospect.(10) Courbage suggests that the sudden reversal of the economic and fiscal condition of Moroccan households caused

      the sharp drop in fertility, which diminished by 20% from 7.3 to 5.9

      children in just four years. Moroccan families instantly faced an

      unprecedented situation, in which most educational, social, health,

      and military expenditures had to be based on their own personal budgets

      rather than on the windfall profits of the state ... [T]he year

      1975 marks a clear turning point in Moroccan demography, precisely

      as a result of changing financial relations between state and citizens.(11)

      Egypt, on the contrary, enjoyed a much longer euphoric interlude. Phillipe Fargues explains that the Egyptian fertility decline, although it began early, was interrupted by President Sadat's 1973 to 1985 Open-Door Policy.

      New wealth originating from outside poured into the country: mass

      emigration to Arab oil countries brought Egypt remittances amounting

      to more than $5 billion a year, and the flow of American money, as

      a reward for the Camp David peace accords, made Egypt the leading

      recipient of U.S. aid...