Fertility, child work, and schooling consequences of family planning programs: Evidence from an experiment in rural Bangladesh

This article contributes to the literature by analyzing the impact of the family planning program on children's labor force participation. While researchers have studied the impact of family planning programs on children's schooling, they have not focused on the likely impact of these programs on children's work. In rural Bangladesh, fertility and children's time allocation are expected to be closely related since children's economic contributions are important for the household (Cain 1977; Cain and Mozumder 1981). This article is based on data from the Matlab Health and Socioeconomic Survey (MHSS), which was fielded in 1996 (Rahman et al. 1999). The results therefore cover the 18-year period between the start of the program and the year when the MHSS was fielded. An earlier paper by Foster and Roy (1997) evaluated the impact of the Matlab program on birth rates and schooling as of 1990. This article differs from their work in the timing of the evaluation and the household choices analyzed. The estimates show that exposure to the program significantly reduced lifetime fertility. Estimates of the fertility equation also show that the program acted as a substitute for female education. The program also resulted in a significant increase in boys' labor force participation but had a small and statistically insignificant impact on the labor force participation of girls. The program did not have significant effects on the school enrollments of either boys or girls. The remainder of this article is organized as follows. Section II reviews the existing literature on program and cross-program impacts of family planning programs. Section III describes the Matlab family planning program experiment, while Section IV describes the theoretical model. Section V describes the data and discusses the estimation strategy, and Section VI discusses the estimates of program impact on fertility. Section VII discusses the estimates of program impact on children's labor force participation and their school enrollment. Section VIII concludes. © 2005 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.