Mass schooling, empowerment, and demographic and economic outcomes: a note of disent

Not found

The new international population movement: a framework for a constructive critique

This paper suggests that the old (neo-Malthusian) ideological orthodoxy which informed much of the population policy debate until the mid-1980s is in danger of being replaced by a new orthodoxy which is also unduly one-sided and simplistic. In addition, this new ideology, which received such a boost at the Cairo conference, is under even less pressure to re-evaluate some of its premises because it is motivated by more obviously altruistic and egalitarian concerns, and a challenge to its premises runs the risk of being interpreted as a challenge to these humane goals. However, letting ideology inform research and policy can have self-defeating consequences when it ignores the complexity of the real world, the frequency of trade-offs, and the many ways in which there may be a conflict between policy-relevant empirical findings and these ideological goals. The paper explores some of these issues in the context of Cairo and presents a framework which may be used to develop a constructive critique of the new international population policy agenda

Women's economic roles and child survival: the case of India

This article provides evidence that women’s employment, in spite of its other benefits, probably has one crucial adverse consequence: a higher level of child mortality than is found among women who do not work. We examine various intermediate mechanisms for this relationship and conclude that a shortage of time is one of the major reasons for this negative relation between maternal employment and child survival. However, even in the area of child survival, there is one aspect which is positively affected by female employment: the disadvantage to girls in survival which is characteristic of South Asia seems to be smaller among working mothers. This is in contrast to the effect of maternal education which may often have no clear relation to the sex ratio of childhood mortality even though absolute levels of child mortality are lower for educated mothers

The International Conference on Population and Development, Cairo, 1994. Is its Plan of Action important, desirable and feasible?

A Postscript to Our Forum of Volume 6(1):71-122. We received two further contributions to the debate featured in the Forum in our last issue. The papers speak for themselves and I will not attempt any further synthesis, except to note that each brings up important issues not fully covered in the previous Forum. John C. Caldwel

Spatial variation in contraceptive use in Bangladesh: Looking beyond the borders

This paper tries to promote a more complete understanding of social change by analyzing spatial patterns of contraceptive use in Bangladesh and the contiguous state of West Bengal in India. The paper takes it’s cue from earlier analysis which found strong evidence of higher contraceptive prevalence in districts of Bangladesh that border Bengali speaking districts on India, as well as from analysis of fertility decline in historical Europe where language played a critical role. Using multilevel analysis to control for variations in individual and household level correlates, mapping districts that deviate considerably from their regional averages, the analysis highlights an important role for cross border influences only in districts that share the same language across the border. Both in Bangladesh and in West Bengal, the districts that are positive outliers in contraception hug the Bangladesh- West Bengal border. Maps of outliers show that the positive outliers show a complete disregard for international borders and form a contiguous band in a manner suggestive of a role for contagion in explaining the levels of contraceptive use

Popular perceptions of emerging influences on mortality and longevity in Bangladesh and West Bengal

Although new environmental and pathological threats to human survival and longevity have been documented, relatively little is known about how these threats are perceived in the popular imagination. During fieldwork in rural Bangladesh and West Bengal, India, researching the changing costs of and motivations for reproduction, the authors included survey questions on respondents’ perceptions of changing mortality. Child-mortality levels were perceived to have fallen drastically in recent times, but for the middle-aged and the elderly, the past was seen as a better time in terms of health and survival. The decline in adult health is attributed to environmental deterioration and lifestyle changes associated with modernization. This paper explores the objective validity of and subjective reasons for this unexpected worldview. References to pesticides and chemical fertilizers as causes of death abound, but mention of other emerging health threats including the HIV/AIDS pandemic, dengue, and toxic levels of arsenic in the water table is conspicuously absent

Forum: Parental education and child mortality

None supplied