Fertility Regulation Behavior: Sequential Decisions in Tunisia

Olfa Frini and Christophe Muller

No 1739, AMSE Working Papers from Aix-Marseille School of Economics, France

Abstract: Fertility analysis in Tunisia is revisited by focusing on regulation instruments instead of the number of births or the number of children alive. In Muslim societies, in which marriage is the exclusive acknowledged childbearing context, a woman may be seen as starting her fertility regulation period by postponing her age at marriage. Once married, she can adjust the delay before her first birth control. Then, she can decide whether or not to use a contraceptive, and finally she can select a specific contraception method. These four decisions, approximately arranged sequentially, may somewhat interact with the sequential stages of the woman’s lifecycle and involve distinct motivations: (1) enrolment in higher education; (2) participation in the labor market; (3) a given fertility objective; and (4) dealing with middle age and old age health problems. Using data from the 2001 Tunisian PAP-FAM survey data, we estimate econometric models that provide an approximate description of fertility regulation as an outcome of the above sequential decisions. Accordingly, the significant effects of our explanatory variables gradually arise and vanish across the models as the women proceeds in her fertility regulation process. Our findings suggest that family network and sociocultural environment greatly shape the household preference for children. Although strict causality inference is beyond the possibilities of a single cross-section, the elicited correlations point to suggestive explanations that call for additional collection efforts to better capture lifecycle decisions of family members and the interactions of the extended family across this lifecycle.

Keywords: fertility regulation; age at marriage; marriage duration at first birth control; contraceptive use; contraception method; Tunisia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C25 C41 J12 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2017-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara
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Working Paper: Fertility Regulation Behavior: Sequential Decisions in Tunisia (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aim:wpaimx:1739

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