CMI WORKING PAPER
FEMALE AUTONOMY AND FERTILITY IN NEPAL
WP 2010: 1
“Population Problem” The heading implies that we are dealing with a problem, more specifically a problem concerning population: we are too many people. Partly is this a question of total resources, partly about the allocation of resources, and partly a normative question. Whether we are too many or not is not my main concern and is definitely outside the scope of this paper. However, most of the population growth is taking place in parts of the world where resources are scarce. A climate crisis and a resource crisis are frequently predicted and more people means more resources are needed. What happens when every Chinese wants a car? is a typical rhetorical question being asked to symbolize the challenges ahead. Everyone deserves the same standard of living that we have in the industrialized countries, but it is difficult to see how it can be delivered with the resources available. Owning a car is one thing, but more important for millions of households are the more basic needs of everyday life, such as food on the table and safe drinking water. What is the optimal number of children for a family? From a community’s stock of resources point of view, the answer to this question may be “few”. From a family’s point of view, which needs some extra pairs of hands to contribute to the family economy, the answer may be “quite a few”. Families like this might contribute to a population growth that is potentially a threat to the already pressured resource foundation in the community. Most would, however, agree that constraining the family’s choices regarding their own family is an inappropriate interference in the private sphere.2 If there is a population problem, is there a solution?
“Solving itself” Or at least: being solved. The scope here is that population growth is the problem and the falling fertility is the solution. Socioeconomic analyses of fertility have been carried out in many countries, with different angles and across various academic disciplines. In economics, the usual way to begin is by assuming that there is a trade-off between quality and quantity of children.3 The trade-off implies that when people, for different reasons, want higher quality children, the cost of raising children increases, making parents substitute from many children to fewer children while investing more in each. The theoretical foundations, including an outline of the Quality-Quantity model, are presented later.
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Even though some countries, China in particular, have implemented policies to limit family size. See Nguyen-Dihn(1990), Hondroyiannis (2004) and Zhang (1990) for examples from Vietnam, Greece and China.
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