Population policies are defined here as voluntary programs which help people control their fertility and expect to improve their lives. There are few studies of the long-run effects of policyinduced changes in fertility on the welfare of women, such as policies that subsidize the diffusion and...

The paper analyzes 141 villages in Matlab, Bangladesh from 1974 to 1996, in which half the villages received from 1977 to 1996 a door-to-door outreach family planning and maternalchild health program. Village and individual data confirm a decline in fertility of about 15 percent in the program...

Economic explanations for the fertility transition focus on the role of returns to schooling, especially for women, which have encouraged women to obtain more education and facilitated the rise in women's wages relative to men's. The private opportunity costs of children have therefore...

This paper reviews the methods and empirical findings from economic analyses of women's contribution to social welfare and the determinants of their human capital. To understand better women's roles in agricultural households, three themes have gained prominence in the economics literature....

There is an inverse association between income per adult and fertility among countries, and across households this inverse association is also often observed. Many studies find fertility is lower among better educated women and is often higher among women whose families own more land and assets....

The associations between fertility and outcomes in the family and society have been treated as causal, but this is inaccurate if fertility is a choice coordinated by families with other life-cycle decisions, including labour supply of mothers and children, child human capital, and savings....

Rural elderly have 40% of the income of those in urban areas, spend a larger share of their income on food, are in worse health, work later into their lives, and depend more on their children, lacking pensions and public services. The birth quota since 1980 has particularly restricted the...

Change in income inequality in Taiwan from 1964 to 1995 is sensitive to how household incomes are adjusted for household composition. The reasonable practice of dividing household income by persons (or adults) in the household eliminates the widely noted increase in income inequality from 1980...