Fertility, contraceptives, female education and economic growth, South Asian countries

Abstract

Analysis of datasets on contraceptive use is important to assess the effectiveness of policy decisions towards meeting the Sustainable Development Goal that endeavours to ensure universal access to contraceptive use and confirms that demand for family planning is fulfilled by the use of operative contraceptive methods which are important for attaining universalisation to accessibility to reproductive health-care services, as explained in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The paper, therefore, attempts to estimate the trends in the contraceptive use and unmet need in India and her major neighbouring countries based on the database provided by the United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2019). To meet the unmet need for use of modern contraceptives, the South Asian countries need to improve the availability of resources for timely delivery of contraceptive services. The paper finally develops a statistical model to explore the causal relationship between economic growth, female educational participation, rate of urbanisation, fertility behaviour and contraceptive use in these set of countries.