Abstract
This paper examines the education-fertility linkage in tribal society through a cross section study on the Misings, the second largest scheduled tribe of the state of Assam, India. Applying multiple regression analysis, the paper finds that while the education of both wife and husband has retarding effect on fertility, the number of live births born is significantly less when wives are more educated than husbands. The education of females has been found to have positive relation with fertility up to 5.3 years of schooling and negative relation thereafter so as to reach the replacement level of fertility at the graduate level of education. Thus, the critical years of education of the wives required to have a depressing impact on fertility is 5.3. The paper recommends policies for expansion of education with primary focus on inclusion and retention of the females in education.
Highlights
The relationship between fertility and education has been widely investigated in population science research
The model traces the independent impact of the wives and husbands on fertility by considering two independent variables for education of the sample wives and husbands along with female age at marriage, contraceptive use, and length of breast-feeding
The mean number of live births ever born to the sample couples has been found to be 2.95
Summary
The relationship between fertility and education has been widely investigated in population science research. A strong effect of education on fertility reduction has been found in the empirical research on tribal population [1, 2] and nontribal populations of India [3,4,5]. A study by Hirschman and Rindfuss [7] observed significant relationship between higher level of education of the women with the timing of first birth. Examining the impact of female education on fertility in eleven countries, Jain observed that in some cases the association between female education and marital fertility is curvilinear, indicating an increase in marital fertility with a small increase in female education [10] It suggests that depressing effect of education on fertility can be expected beyond a threshold level of education. (3) What should be the critical years of education that would have depressing impact on fertility?
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