Fertility, Education and Development: Further Evidence from India

There has been a significant decline in fertility in many parts of India since the early 1980s. This paper reexamines the determinants of fertility levels and fertility decline, using panel data on Indian districts for 1981 and 1991. We find that women's education is the most important factor explaining fertility differences across the country and over time. Low levels of child mortality and son preferences also contribute to lower fertility. By contrast, general indicators of modernization and development such as urbanisation, poverty reduction, and male literacy bear no significant association with fertility. En passant, we probe a subject of much confusion - the relation between fertility decline and gender bias.Fertility, demographic transition, female literacy, India

Attitudes to equality : the"socialist legacy"revisited

It is routinely assumed that residents of post-socialist countries have a preference for greater income equality, other things being equal, owing to the legacy of socialism. This proposition is examined in the context of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union using data from three waves of the World Values Survey. Contrary to expectations, the authors find little evidence of a'socialist legacy'en bloc. Considering the former Soviet Union separately from other post-socialist countries, the analysis finds that as a group these countries display significantly lower preference for moving toward greater income equality than both Eastern Europe and other comparator groups (developed and developing countries). These findings hold up even when controlling for the conventional determinants of attitudes such as income level and employment status of the individual respondent, as well as national factors such as per-capita income and its distribution. Moreover, the preference for greater income inequality appears to have persisted at least since the mid-1990s and possibly since the early 1990s (data difficulties preclude a robust examination of this latter question). The results are consistent with the fairly low levels of public spending on redistribution commonly found in the former Soviet Union.Access to Finance,Inequality,,Poverty Impact Evaluation,Corporate Law

Fertility, education and development: further evidence from India

There has been a significant decline in fertility in many parts of India since the early 1980s. This paper reexamines the determinants of fertility levels and fertility decline, using panel data on Indian districts for 1981 and 1991. We find that women's education is the most important factor explaining fertility differences across the country and over time. Low levels of child mortality and son preferences also contribute to lower fertility. By contrast, general indicators of modernization and development such as urbanisation, poverty reduction, and male literacy bear no significant association with fertility. En passant, we probe a subject of much confusion - the relation between fertility decline and gender bias

Literacy in India

Literacy refers to an individual’s ability to communicate through reading and writing. The literacy rate for any population measures the fraction of the population, above a certain cut-off age, that is literate. Based on the most recent statistics compiled by UNESCO, more than one in three Indians above the age of 15 years is unable to read and write. Further, the roughly 268 million adult illiterates in India constitute one-third of the global population of illiterates. International comparisons show that the Indian literacy rate is well below those for other populous countries like China and also below those for developing countries in general.

Administrative fees and costs of mandatory private pensions in transition economies

This paper discusses fees and costs of pension companies in transition economies drawing on examples from four countries Croatia, Hungary, Kazakhstan and Poland where second pillar pensions have the longest history of implementation. It finds that at current levels, charges are likely to reduce returns on individual account balances by around 1% per annum on average. Exact rates vary by country and company. Fee structures are complex and, generally speaking, poorly understood by consumers. The limited information on costs that is available suggests that, by and large, companies are able to meet their operating costs within a few years after starting operations. There are large sunk costs in setting up business. As a result the industry displays strong economies of scale. Based on the available evidence, the paper estimates fixed costs to be of the order of $35 per account per year (the 95$21 $49 per account per year). Given costs of this order of magnitude, individual accounts need to be of the order of 4 6% of average wages for the second pillar to be viable i.e. to deliver a return greater than what can be expected from an unchanged first pillar.

The Maturity Structure of Administrative Costs: Theory and the UK Experience

Front-loading of charges on insurance products can impose considerable costs on consumers when policies lapse early. This paper develops a theory of the maturity structure of charges similar to that used to examine the term structure of interest rates, and applies it to the UK experience with individual accounts. We find that the implied term structure of charges was historically sharply decreasing (so that charges relative to the account balance were higher the shorter the maturity of the account), with implicit yields in the early years of an account strongly negative. In the past year, however, the relationship has changed dramatically as a result of regulated charge levels and structures associated with the new Stakeholder pensions. 1 Mamta Murthi is Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, U.K. Her address is Centre for History and Economics, Kings College, Cambridge CB2 1ST. Phone: +44-1223-331-197, Fax: +44-1223-331-198. Email: [email protected]. 2 J. Michael Orszag is..