Conventional interpretations of modern fertility transition put roughly equal weight on socioeconomic change affecting the outlook, opportunities, and incentives of individuals and families, thence lowering fertility demand, and on family planning program activities-especially those directed at meeting an "unmet need" for birth control by couples or by women. Through informational and ideational effects, family planning programs, it is believed, may also influence demand. It is usually taken for granted that governments will assume a major role in these programs, sometimes an exclusive role. Yet the resulting picture of benign, therapeutic government accords poorly with the realities of many developing countries-including those countries (mostly Asian) seen as embodiments of success in engineered fertility transition. A closer look at these instances would suggest the salience of two other dimensions of state influence on fertility, which I term "regularity" and "duress." Regularity refers to the level of attainment of security in person and property and of predictability in relations with local authority-making for greater prominence of the nuclear family economy and faster economic growth, both with implications for fertility. Duress refers to the use of political or administrative pressure, and in rare cases physical force, to change fertility. Vigorous recruitment campaigns for family planning clients and harassment of non-acceptors are likely to involve at least a moderate degree of duress. The two routes of influence are fairly independent of each other. Taking them as orthogonal axes, countries can be roughly positioned (on isoquants representing the pace of fertility decline) by their comparative or combined reliance on each. The resulting analysis illuminates the political circumstances that underlie fertility transition, and brings greater clarity to discussions of the transferability of population policy experience.

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This page updated 28 April 2005

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