The effects of education and family planning programs on fertility in Indonesia

Numerous studies indicate that female education is a major determinant of fertility and that the estimated effects are large relative to other variables, including family planning program variables. There are, however, two serious deficiencies in the research relating educational attainment to fertility that could give rise to invalid inferences. First, many public programs, including health and family planning programs, may influence a woman’s decisions about education, and these indirect programmatic effects might be large. Second, nearly all existing studies of the impacts of education on fertility assume that a woman's educational attainment is exogenous. Education could be serving as a proxy for such unobservable determinants as ability, motivation, and parental background, as these factors most likely are important determinants of a woman's educational attainment. We use the 1993 Indonesian Family Life Survey to compare the estimated impacts of education on fertility from a simple model that assumes the exogeneity of education and an unobserved factor model that allows for endogeneity of schooling. The model imposing questionable exogeneity assumptions appears to overpredict the fertility‐reducing effects of female education, better schools, and higher government health expenditures and to underpredict the importance of family planning programs for reducing fertility and for inducing young women to remain in school

Poverty and the economic transition in the Russian Federation

Introduction In what some describe as one of the great natural experiments of our time, the Russian Federation has introduced a series of sweeping economic reforms over a very short period of time, beginning in January 1992. These include the elimination of most food subsidies; the reduction of other food subsidies and subsidies for fuel and most other basic commodities; the use of freely fluctuating market prices; the privatization of selected state enterprises; the creation of conditions for the establishment of a private sector in many areas of economic activity; and the initiation of a process that will ultimately transfer much property and land into private ownership. The result is rapid economic and social change. Western observers agree that this transformation will produce significant dislocations and affect many people adversely. Most expect that the worst dislocations will be in the short term, with the transformation leading to substantial long-term benefits. The Russians involved in the design and implementation of this transition, as well as Russian politicians, have been and continue to be deeply concerned about the impacts of the reforms on poverty levels

Structural change in the impact of income on food consumption in China, 1989-1993

Change has not always been steady in China, and evidence of increased poverty among some subpopulation groups exists. For example, among the rural poor in some areas there has been an increase in chronic energy deficiency, while, particularly among higher-income groups, the incidences of high-fat diets and obesity have increased rapidly. There has been a marked shift not only in obesity but also in other diet-related chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and certain types of cancers. These are rapidly becoming major health problems in the higher-income population. In this article we first present the overall picture with a cross-country analysis of changes in the dietary structure, and we explore the income-fat and diet-obesity relationships. Then we present data from China that demonstrate the trend in the dietary structure. This is followed by a more rigorous examination and testing of the income-food consumption relationship. The behavioral changes that we uncover in the income-food relationship have important implications for the formulation of future nutrition policies in China. We explore some of these implications in the concluding section