Reproductive Health Laws Around the World

Jocelyn Finlay (), David Canning and June Po
Additional contact information
Jocelyn Finlay: Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies
June Po: Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies

PGDA Working Papers from Program on the Global Demography of Aging

Abstract: We develop an index of reproductive health laws around the world. Laws regarding abortion, contraceptive pill, condom, intrauterine device, and sterilization are detailed for 186 countries from 1960 through to 2009. Using qualitative information dating from the 1960s, we code information on reproductive health laws around the world into panel data. In this paper we summarize the indexation of the laws, detailing the sources and methodologies we used to create the index. We show changes in the laws over time, and compare laws across countries. In addition, we demonstrate the potential use of the panel data by exploring the differential liberalization of reproductive health laws across country-level socioeconomic factors. We show that countries with more liberal abortion laws associated with higher income per capita, higher levels of female education, and lower fertility rates.

Keywords: Fertility; Reproductive Health Laws; Abortion; Contraception (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-hea and nep-law
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/pgda/WorkingPapers/2012/PGDA_WP_96.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/pgda/WorkingPapers/2012/PGDA_WP_96.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/pgda/WorkingPapers/2012/PGDA_WP_96.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> http://hsph.harvard.edu/research/global-demography-aging/ [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://hsph.harvard.edu/research/global-demography-aging/)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gdm:wpaper:9612

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in PGDA Working Papers from Program on the Global Demography of Aging
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Cinzia Smothers ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).