State of World Population 2012 - Country Page List - UNFPA

tradeoff that induces parents to invest more
resources into each child when the number of
children falls.
Household savings, income and assets
Improved health and longer life-expectancies
that can result from better access to reproductive
health services, including family planning,
alter decisions not only about education, but
also about expenditures and savings over an
individual’s lifetime. With declines in fertility,
individuals are less likely to rely on children
for old age-support and insurance. They are
thus more inclined to save for their own
retirement. The impetus to save is further
reinforced by improved health and increased
life expectancy since retirement becomes a
reasonable prospect, and the length of retirement
also increases. There is ample evidence
to support this relationship between fertility
decline and savings rates (Bloom and Canning,
2008). Many studies find a positive correlation
between declines in fertility or increases in life
expectancy on the one hand, and savings rates
on the other.
In Taiwan, Province of China, for example,
the private savings rate rose from 5 per cent
in the 1950s to over 20 per cent in the 1980s,
almost synchronously with improvements in life
expectancy (Tsai, Chu and Chung, 2000). This
effect is amplified with the adoption of welfare
and social security systems.
Some of the best micro-level evidence of the
relationship between lower fertility, improved
reproductive health, and income comes again
from Matlab, Bangladesh (Joshi and Schultz,
2007; Schultz, 2008; Barham, 2009; Schultz,
2009). The overall evidence suggests that
declines in fertility and child mortality contributed
to poverty alleviation: sons received
significantly more schooling, daughters had a
better nutritional status, and better educated
women had proportionately higher wage rates
and lived in households with proportionately
greater assets. Households in villages covered
by the programme reported 25 per cent more
assets per adult, and held smaller shares of
household assets in forms which complement
child labour, such as livestock and fishing
or even land for agricultural annual cultivation.
They held a larger share of their assets in
financial savings, jewelry, orchards and ponds,
housing, and consumer durables, which may be
assets that are better substitutes for old age support
provided traditionally by children.
Improved access to family planning, declines
in fertility, the reduction of maternal mortality
and maternal morbidity and the improvement
of child health also increase savings and income
through the reduction of spending to cope
with “health shocks,” such as a sudden loss of
earnings, the dissolution of households and a
reduction in the health of surviving household
members, particularly children. Improved health
also contributes to economic productivity.
Shifts in intra-household decision-making
The availability of reproductive health services,
particularly family planning, also alters power
structures within households. In contexts where
men and women differ in their fertility preferences,
and where family planning services are
accessible to women independently, greater
control over their fertility translates into greater
bargaining power, autonomy and decisionmaking
capacity within the family.
An example of this at the country level comes
from Bangladesh. The rapid decline in fertility,
from approximately six children per woman in
the 1970s to under three children per woman
80 CHAPTER 4: THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC IMPACT OF FAMILY PLANNING