The dynamics of fertility, family planning and female education in Pakistan

Abstract

The present study analyses the dynamics of fertility and its determinants in a country at very low levels of socio-economic development. It binds the relationship between fertility and its determinants with a particular focus on planned family planning within a multivariate cointegrated Granger-casual framework. The methodology employed uses various unit root test and Johansen’s cointegration test followed by vector error-correction model, and variance decompositions in order to capture both within-sample and out-of-sample Granger causality between fertility and its determinants. The findings appeared to be consistent with recent theoretical statements that maintain that although in the long-run the sufficient condition of fertility decline may be the result of a complex dynamic interaction with planned family planning and significant socio-economic structural changes. While in the short-run the necessary condition of fertility decline may not need that significant structural change, but may require a client-oriented affordable but persuasive ‘planned’ family-planning programme, coupled with few years of schooling, particularly female, firmly supported by the political and social elite at all levels of that society, and also adapted to the socio-cultural realities of the vast masses of the people of that country.