Marriage postponement in Iran: accounting for socio-economic and cultural change in time and space

The mean age at marriage of Iranian women increased by three years between the mid-1980s and 2000 during a period of great socio-economic change, particularly affecting the 1971–1975 and 1976–1980 birth cohorts. This paper analyses the marriage timing and life course experience of these cohorts of women and highlights the contribution that ethnicity and changes in the socio-economic context made to the sharp marriage delay experienced by the 1976–1980 birth cohort. A discrete time hazard model is applied to the 2000 Iran Demographic and Health Survey data, which are linked to a range of time-varying district-level contextual variables created from the 1986 and 1996 Iranian censuses. The findings suggest that the marriage postponement experienced by the younger birth cohort is related to improvements in women's education and can partly be explained by the increased opportunity costs of marriage, which resulted from limited access to education after marriage. The findings also suggest that differences in marriage timing between areas predominated by certain ethnic groups became less evident for the younger birth cohort

Demography, Education, and Democracy: Global Trends and the Case of Iran

Reconstructions and projections of populations by age, sex, and educational attainment for 120 countries since 1970 are used to assess the global relationship between improvements in human capital and democracy. Democracy is measured by the Freedom House indicator of political rights. Similar to an earlier study on the effects of improving educational attainment on economic growth, the greater age detail of this new dataset resolves earlier ambiguities about the effect of improving education as assessed using a global set of national time series. The results show consistently strong effects of improving overall levels of educational attainment, of a narrowing gender gap in education, and of fertility declines and the subsequent changes in age structure on improvements in the democracy indicator. This global relationship is then applied to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Over the past two decades Iran has experienced the world's most rapid fertility decline associated with massive increases in female education. The results show that based on the experience of 120 countries since 1970, Iran has a high chance of significant movement toward more democracy over the following two decades. Copyright (c) 2010 The Population Council, Inc..