Soviet theories of economic demography: a survey

At this time Soviet demographic scientists maintain the position that population problems may in fact exist temporarily under socialism but that the planning principle will allow society to resolve population problems, through the use of the administrative, moral, and economic levers (subsidies, government policies, propaganda, education) emphasized by Urlanis (1974) and others. For planners to deal effectively with population management, the determinants of fertility and labor force participation must be established. The foundations of Soviet theories of human capital and fertility were laid by several writers. For the sake of simplicity, these are referred to as the Urlanis-Strumilin model, named after 2 pioneer researchers in Soviet demography and manpower economics. The formulations are based upon the writings of Strumlin (1964) and Urlanis (1974), supplemented by writings of numerous other Soviet researchers. Although their models avoid neoclassical terms such as marginal utility and income and price elasticities, they clearly employ these concepts. The Urlanis-Strumilin model, reduced to its basic elements, is a direct household utility maximizing model. The husband and wife, the household decision makers, must select optimal levels of child "quantity," child "quality," leisure, their own human capital (further education and training), and other goods. The Soviet theory recognizes that an increase in household income will increase relatively the demands for income elastic goods. The model postulates that the demand for child quality is inversely related to the price of children. The price of children is the opportunity cost of children, the major element of which is the income foregone by the mother in the course of childbearing and childrearing. The child quantity demand schedule has elastic and inelastic portions. The marginal utility of the 1st child is great. The marginal utilities of higher order children decline substantially. Families with at least 1 child can make substitutions between having more children and raising the quality of children already born. The question is what does the model predict will happen to fertility with economic development. The positive income effect will be limited as increased income is channelled into child quality and other superior goods rather than child quantity. The Urlanis-Strumilin model of labor supply assumes that the household allocates its time among market employment, household production. The model shows that the effect of children on female labor supply is not ambiguous. The presence of young children raises the value of home services and lowers long run market wages, thereby reducing female market labor supply. According to the model, the socialist state can manipulate labor supplies through several channels. It can reduce the value of home services by providing market substitutes. Soviet writers recognize the linkages between labor supply and fertility without formalizing the simultaneous relationship. The comparative statics of the Soviet model are essentially the same as those of the neoclassical model: an increase in "costs" of children will have, at best, a small positive impact on fertility.     

Child Schooling and Work Decisions in India: The Role of Household and Regional Gender Equity

Abstract

This paper tests three hypotheses about how mothers' autonomy in India affects their children's participation in school and the labor market. To do so it extends the concept of mothers' autonomy beyond the household to include the constraints imposed by the extent of gender equity in the regions in which these women live. This study began with the expectation that increased autonomy for Indian mothers living in heterosexual households would increase child schooling and decrease child work. However, the results are mixed, indicating that mother's autonomy can be reinforced or constrained by the environment. The paper concludes that mothers and fathers in India make different decisions for girls vis-à-vis boys and that the variables reflecting mothers' autonomy vary in their impact, so that mothers' level of education relative to fathers' is not often statistically significant, while mothers' increased contributions to household expenditure decrease the probability of schooling and girls' work.     

Reproductive behaviour in peasant societies: a theoretical and empirical analysis

In spite of the concern and repeated attempts to promote population control programs, a coherent and unified theory of peasant reproductive behavior has not emerged. The author attempts to extend the microeconomic foundations of reproductive behavior by considering a dynamic intertemporal model of household production emphasizing survival uncertainty and age specific differences in productive ability. An optimal policy is derived in a single sex model in which decisions are made sequentially based on new information. It is shown that households will follow a stopping rule; the household will continue to reproduce until an optimal number of living children is reached. As a consequence of the stopping rule households will appear to be replacing infant and child deaths if these occurred early in the program. After presenting the model, empirical applications of the theory are explored and the model is estimated using sample survey data collected in Bangladesh in 1977. Issues raised in the analysis are discussed.     

Child allowances and allocative decisions in Romanian households

In this paper it is tested whether increasing child allowances will affect the intra-household allocation of consumption, measured by child and adult goods, holding total household resources constant. The analysis is based on household survey data collected in Romania, where cash payments are made to families according to the number and age of children. Selectivity is controled for since there is the potential for self-selection bias in terms of the level of child allowances received. The findings suggest that holding total household resources constant, child allowances increase demand for child goods and calories and reduce demand for adult goods.     

CHILD LABOUR IN VIETNAM

Abstract.  The paper tests the explanatory power of a theoretical model of household decisions about child labour and school enrolment and analyses the determinants of child labour in Vietnam, a country that is experiencing a rapid transition toward a market economy. The theoretical framework, used as a benchmark, is in the spirit of the 'new household' economics and links household decisions about schooling and child labour to intergenerational altruism and to human capital investment. On this basis, we analyse the evolution and determinants of child labour using two household surveys (1993 and 1998) for Vietnam.     

Old age,risk, security and children: an empirical evidence from rural India

An investment model of the demand for children is developed to demonstrate that old-age security provided by children is an important consideration in the fertility decisions of parents. "The paper is organized as follows: Section II presents the importance of children as a source of old age support and risk mitigating mechanism. The investment approach for the demand for children is presented in Section III. Section IV...explores the implications in the context of a recent household survey conducted in rural India. Finally, the findings are summarised in Section V."     

TIME AND THE COST OF CHILDREN

This paper uses the "adult goods" method to estimate the full costs of children. Full costs include both expenditure and time costs. Adult personal time (comprising pure leisure, sleep and other personal care) is used as the adult good. Previous research has shown that the presence of children in the household leads to a reduction in adult personal time. This paper develops a simple economic model of the household to show how this information can be used to develop an equivalence scale for adult consumption that takes account of both the expenditure and time costs of children. Preliminary estimates using Australian data suggest a very large cost—much higher than that typically assumed for expenditure costs. The full cost of children declines with age, despite the expenditure cost rising. The paper discusses the limitations of the adult good method and the assumptions needed to draw welfare conclusions from these and other estimates of child costs.     

Demand for household sanitation in India using NFHS-3 data

India has the highest number of people defecating in the open, and the Indian Government is trying to eradicate by constructing toilets for its citizens. This paper is about whether the government is likely to succeed in its cleanliness drive mission by a supply-side policy. We examine the household preference and other the factors leading to open defecation in India. We examine preference for having a toilet in the household over the preference of other household durable goods. Our results suggest toilets get a lower preference—ranked 12, out of 21 different types of consumer durables we investigate. The results also indicate a strong case for imparting education and public awareness, especially, among the female cohort. We find the odds of having toilets in a household with an educated woman (18 years of schooling) is 3.1 times more than a household with illiterate or preschool educated women. Among other factors households living in urban areas are 19 times more likely to have toilets in comparison with their rural counterparts.     

Child survival,height for age and household characteristics in Brazil

"The impact of household characteristics on child survival and height, conditional on age, is examined using household survey data from Brazil. Parental education is found to have a very strong positive effect on both outcomes and this is robust to the inclusion of household income and also parental heights, which partly proxy for unobserved family background characteristics. We find that income effects are significant and positive for child survival but insignificant for for child height although the latter depends on identification assumptions. Parental height has a large positive impact on child height and on survival rates even after controlling for all other observable characteristics."     

The impact of fiscal policies on agricultural household decisions

This paper provides a comparative static analysis of farm household's production, consumption, and labor market decisions under alternative tax policies. We explore the implications of non-separable household decisions caused by widespread non-participation in labor, land, financial and/or food markets, as is typical of low income economies. The analytical results indicate that when labor market imperfections occur, most tax-induced responses are ambiguous, mainly due to shadow price effects. This is particularly the case for the labor market and production responses to most tax tools under study, while a decreasing demand for consumption goods appears to be the result in several cases. Furthermore, tax-induced allocation effects may differ between the non-separable and the separable model versions, indicating the potential impact of labor market constraints on farm household responses to tax policies. In particular, standard taxes as well as a land tax may imply production adjustments in the case of non-separability.     

Schooling,wages and profits: Negative pecuniary externalities from schooling and their consequences for schooling investments

This paper tests the hypothesis that the schooling of the poor reduces profits for landowners, and that such negative pecuniary externalities in turn adversely affect schooling investments made by local governments. A theoretical model of occupational choice in the presence of credit and labor market constraints, combined with existing political economy models of the delivery of local public goods delivers such a result. This hypothesis is tested using household data from India. The empirical analysis shows that profits are reduced by the schooling of the poor and that this is primarily because of the effect of schooling on wages. It also shows that the negative effect of wages on profits reduces government provided schooling inputs.     

Unemployment and consumption patterns

In this paper we obtain empirical evidence about the effect of female and male unemployment on household demand of a selection of goods and services. We analyse the percentage of the family income expenditure on a particular group of goods concerning education, domestic services, leisure goods, hotels etc. The impact of several determinants on each group of commodities is estimated using a Tobit specification. The data used for estimation have been taken from The Household Expenditure Survey (1990–91). Our main result is that male and female unemployment has a different impact on the household consumption.     

Children as consumers: investigating child diary expenditure data

Abstract.  We investigate expenditure behaviour of school-aged children using child diary information contained in the British Family Expenditure Survey. The estimates from an Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS) for child expenditure suggest that drinks, sweets, books, and toys are 'normal' goods for children, but clothes, travel, leisure and vice products are 'luxury' items with income elasticities greater than one. Being a lone-parent child and having a working mother are important factors in determining child expenditure decisions. Importantly, a higher parental budget share on any given commodity is typically associated with an increased child budget share on the same commodity.     

Fertility,Female Labor Supply,and Family Policy

The present paper develops an overlapping generations general equilibrium model for Germany in order to study the impact of public policy on household labor supply and fertility decisions. Starting from a benchmark equilibrium which reflects the current German family policy regime we introduce various reforms of the tax and child benefit system and quantify the consequences for birth rates and female labor supply. Our simulations indicate three central results: First, higher transfers to families (either direct, in‐kind or via family splitting) may increase birth rates significantly, but they may come at the cost of lower female employment. Second, the introduction of individual taxation (instead of joint taxation of couples) would increase female employment but might further reduce current birth rates in Germany. Third, it is possible to increase birth rates and female employment rates simultaneously if the government invests in child care facilities for children of all ages.     

A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE MEASUREMENT OF WELL-BEING

The conceptual framework of the system specifies that societal resources are limited by two basic factors: the amount of available human time, and the stock of wealth inherited from the past. Wealth is defined very broadly to cover not only the conventional tangible capital assets familiar to economists, but also intangible human and other capital assets, stocks of organizational capital reflected by networks of social support systems (the family, the neighbourhood), stocks of environmental assets (the sun and air), and stocks of socio-political assets (security, freedom of choice). Human time covers market work, household production, leisure, and biological maintenance. Human time and capital stocks are used within households to produce a variety of tangible and intangible outputs, and these outputs in turn are used to produce a variety of satisfactions (utilities) or to augment stocks of capital, or both. The basic sources of well-being in the system are ultimately of two types: well-being is produced as a consequence of the intrinsic benefits from all activities engaged in by individuals, which is to say that people have preferences over the way they spend their time; secondly, people derive utilities from the existence of various stocks or states of society, and these satisfactions are independent of the way in which time is used. The satisfactions associated with flows of goods are subsumed by satisfactions derived from activities associated with those goods. The system contains a set of linkages among the various parts: inputs of goods and time are used to produce tangible household output, using the familiar notions of household production functions and constrained optimization; tangible household products, which are intermediate in the system, are used in conjunction with human time to produce direct satisfactions or to augment household capital stocks; both household (micro) and societal (macro) capital stocks are linked directly to psychological well-being; household activities are linked directly to flows of satisfactions, termed process benefits in the system; household preferences and values relating to policy variables are linked to public policies of various sorts, and policies modify the constraints and opportunities relevant for household decisions. The system also has dynamic linkages. Modifications of household or public stocks produce impacts on future flows of well-being; satisfactions from activities may adapt to the existence of constraints, hence changes in constraints can modify preferences and subsequently modify activities; and household behavior has a life-cycle dimension which is inherently dynamic.     

Missing women in Indian districts: a quantitative analysis

The ratio of women to men in India reveals socially determined excess female mortality. The cultural and economic variables used to explain variations in the juvenile sex ratio are interrelated with each other and with other demographic and economic variables, and show large regional differences within India. Our empirical study is built on an extension to Sen's entitlements framework and spatial lag and spatial error econometric procedures. We find that low female labour participation (FLP) is an important determinant of anti-female child bias in regions characterised by both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian kinship systems, but where Indo-Aryan kinship predominates, mainly in Northern India, the effect of FLP is much more significant.     

Child participation,nature of work,and fertility demand: a theoretical analysis

A model of utility maximization with home production of children and standard of living is used to analyze the fertility behavior of a subsistence farming household in an agricultural lesser developed country. Assuming children as both consumer and producer goods, and assuming a prestige cost of their participation in labor force, the author derived alternative levels of fertility demand. The following different conditions of child participation were identified depending upon the size of the prestige cost and the resultant net gain from child work: (1) participation in wage-labor, if marginal child income from the family farm is less than marginal wage income; (2) participation in family farm works only, if the larger wage income is neutralized by a higher prestige cost, implying a lower child contribution; (3) participation in family farm works only, if its marginal child income is greater than wage income, thus providing the largest child contribution; and (4) no participation in labor force at all, implied by a very high prestige cost and resulting in no child contribution. The household demands a larger number of children under conditions (1) and (3) than under conditions (2) and (4). The results are then used to draw inferences regarding fertility behavior across different landholding households. It appears that landholding reduces fertility initially, increases it at the intermediate levels, and then decreases it when the household becomes a non-cultivating rental income earner. The nonmonotonic landholding-fertility relationship explains the contradictory empirical evidence which exists in the literature while also suggesting important implications for fertility regulation policy.     

Microfinance and gender empowerment

In this paper, we develop a theoretical model of household production, bargaining and credit to analyse how access to microcredit affects intra-household decision-making and welfare, and identify conditions under which female household members are most likely to benefit. We show that, consistent with ethnographic accounts of the impact of microcredit programmes on poor households, access to loans can lead to a variety of outcomes for intra-household decision-making and welfare depending on initial conditions and that, in some instances, women borrowers may experience a decline in welfare. We identify two instances in which a woman is most likely to benefit: when there is scope for investing the loan profitably in a joint activity, and when a large share of the household budget is devoted to household public goods.     

TIME VS. GOODS: THE VALUE OF MEASURING HOUSEHOLD PRODUCTION TECHNOLOGIES

We take U.S. and Israeli household data on expenditures of time and goods, generate an exhaustive set of commodities that households produce/consume using them, and calculate their relative goods intensities. Leisure activities are uniformly relatively time intensive, health, travel and lodging relatively goods intensive. We demonstrate how education and age alter the goods intensity of household production. The results of this accounting can be used as guides to: understanding how goods and income taxation interact to affect welfare; expanding notions of the determinants of international flows of goods; generating models of business cycles and endogenous growth to include interactions of goods and time consumption; and obtaining better measures of the distribution of well being.     

Child labor and the minimum wage: Evidence from India

This study examines how changes in the minimum wage affect child labor in India. The analysis uses repeated cross sections of India's NSSO employment data from 1983 to 2008 merged with data on state-level minimum wage rates. Theoretically, the impact of the minimum wage on child work could go either way, so empirical evidence from a country with high rates of child labor and a myriad of minimum wage laws across states and industries helps to lessen the ambiguity. Results indicate that regardless of gender, in urban areas, a higher minimum wage reduces child labor in household work. In rural areas a similar result applies for girls while household labor does rise for boys. The minimum wage has virtually no impact on child work outside of the home across urban and rural areas.