The Gender and Generational Consequences of the Demographic Transition and Population Policy: An Assessment of the Micro and Macro Linkages

T. Paul Schultz, Yale University

The direct and indirect effects of welfare programs should be evaluated together; programs have direct effects on say child health, schooling, family planning, and reproductive health, and spillover to affect other interdependent family outcomes of social importance. For example, having fewer children may contribute to healthier and better-educated children, and may allow women to allocate more time to market work and accumulate more wealth. A long-term quasi-experiment in maternal and child health and family planning in Matlab subdistrict, Bangladesh, documents that program benefits differ by gender and generation, specifically in terms of fertility, investment in human capital, and accumulation of physical assets. Program effects are estimated, first, based on unconditional local average intent-to-treat effects, assuming treatments are uncorrelated with other determinants of these outcomes, second, observed exogenous family and village constraints are suitably controlled, and third, program effects are allowed to differ across types of families and villages.