Incentives for Small Families: Concepts and Issues

Chomitz, Kenneth M.; Birdsall, Nancy

doi:10.1093/wber/4.suppl_1.309

Cited by 9 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…However, the opposite problem, that individuals may be deterred by the short-term costs of actions that would bring them long-term benefits, must likewise be considered in a comprehensive ethical analysis of interventions in family planning. In this situation, as Chomitz and Birdsall (1990) aptly state, “it is their inaction rather than their action that induces regret (pg. 317).” Indeed, in family planning, it is likely that individuals discount the delayed reinforcement gained by adopting family planning (e.g., postponing pregnancy until adulthood; spacing pregnancies sufficiently; avoiding unintended pregnancy) so significantly that it is not sufficient to sustain the more proximal behavioral costs/efforts necessary to do so.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Incentives to promote family planning

Heil

Gaalema

Herrmann

2012

Preventive Medicine

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Objective Over the past 60 years, population control has become an increasingly urgent issue worldwide as a growing population strains already limited resources. The use of financial incentives to promote family planning is an innovative approach that has potential to make a contribution to efforts to better manage population growth. This report reviews eight studies that examined the effect of incentives on family planning. Method Published studies that tested the impact of incentives to promote some aspect of family planning and included an appropriate control or comparison condition were reviewed. Results Incentives have been used to promote attendance at contraceptive education sessions, adoption and continuation of contraceptive methods, sterilization, and to limit family size. All but one of the eight studies reviewed reported positive outcomes, but weaknesses in study design and execution limit the strength of the conclusions that can be drawn. Conclusion Review of this literature suggests that family planning behaviors, like other behaviors, are sensitive to incentives. Given the tremendous need for efficacious interventions in global efforts to manage population growth, further research on this topic using more rigorous experimental methods is warranted.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Incentives to promote family planning

Heil

Gaalema

Herrmann

2012

Preventive Medicine

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“…Finally, a few authors have pointed out various reasons for why the private and social costs of having children could differ (Friedman (1972), Chomitz and Birdsall (1991), Lee and Miller (1991), Simon (1992), and Starrett (1993)). These papers informally discuss types of externalities that could arise in the context of fertility choice, but none provides a formal concept or the tools to thoroughly address the efficiency question.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Efficiency with Endogenous Population Growth

2007

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In this paper, we generalize the notion of Pareto-efficiency to make it applicable to environments with endogenous populations. Two efficiency concepts are proposed, P−efficiency and A-efficiency. The two concepts differ in how they treat people who are not born. We show how these concepts relate to the notion of Pareto-efficiency when fertility is exogenous. We then prove versions of the first welfare theorem assuming that decision making is efficient within the dynasty. Finally, we give two sets of sufficient conditions for noncooperative equilibria of family decision problems to be efficient. These include the Barro and Becker model as a special case.

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“…The following discussion also reflects the authors' own analyses, includingBirdsall and Griffin (1993),Chomitz and Birdsall (1991), andBirdsall (1994). The possibility that men and women have different interests in fertility decisions was raised frequently in the deliberations as the Bellagio Symposium.16 Models with individual utility functions and bargaining among household members would better reflect the underlying mechanisms leading to the intra-household allocation of resources.…”

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confidence: 87%

Setting the Stage

2015

The Sound of Innovation

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For more than 200 years, ever since the Revd Thomas Malthus produced his famous First Essay on Population, scholars and intellectuals have been debating the question of whether population growth inhibits improvements in the social and economic conditions of societies. The debate acquired special urgency in the second half of the twentieth century as population growth reached rates higher than had ever been previously recorded in country after country, and policy-makers demanded to know whether or not they should intervene directly. Unfortunately, scientific research has not provided particularly useful guidance to policy over the last half century. Practitioners of the various disciplines differed strongly among themselves and produced widely divergent, often contradictory advice to policy-makers. The part that follows traces some of the history of recent debates between economists and members of other disciplines, and among economists themselves. Birdsall and Sinding summarize the principal conclusions that emerged from the symposium from which this book derives. Foremost among the findings is a shift in the view of most economists who have studied the demographic/economic development relationship in recent years-from a view that the relationship is neutral to mildly negative to one that finds considerable evidence that high fertility often inhibits growth and that successful efforts to reduce fertility can accelerate economic development. Allen Kelley traces the evolution of academic inquiry on the significance of population growth for development, from alarmism to what he calls 'revisionism' , to a more nuanced form of revisionist thought-from the 1950s and 1960s population crisis mentality, to the 1980s view that population growth is a 'neutral' phenomenon, to the contemporary view (which is encapsulated in the title of this book) that population does matter. He points out that the key factor distinguishing the various assessments is the time period over which population impacts are assessed. The impacts highlighted during the 'alarmist period' were distinctly direct, and short run, in which demographic impacts are relatively strong. The impacts during the 'neutralist' period were long run in focus, allowing time for adjustments and feedbacks to occur. Demography had smaller roles in this time frame. In the 1990s, an intermediate time perspective is adopted-a few decades of the demographic transition-so the impacts found, not surprisingly, are somewhere in between: population does matter, but it is not all determining, nor can or should it be ignored. John Bongaarts helps to lay the groundwork for understanding why population matters by explaining the rapid shifts in dependency burdens that occur during the transition from high to low mortality and fertility. Early in the transition, populations are very young and the size of the young age cohort (under age 15), compared to the economically active one (15-65), is very large. At the middle stages of the transition, as fertility falls, the proportions begin Set...

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Incentives for Small Families: Concepts and Issues

Cited by 9 publications

References 22 publications

Incentives to promote family planning

Incentives to promote family planning

Efficiency with Endogenous Population Growth

Setting the Stage

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