Old Age Security with Fewer Children
Less developed countries can promote reduced fertility and slower population growth while still supporting the idea of old age security through children. If parents have enough children to provide a high probability of one son surviving until the father is age 65 they will have had many children even if the father has a vasectomy once having reached the larger family size. The interval between generations will be short and natural increase rapid. Instead governments should encourage couples to adopt the "always a son" strategy whereby parents have a son as soon as possible and then practice contraception as long as he survives making use of only reversible contraceptive techniques. This strategy is in accord with most traditional societies values since it means having children soon until a son is born who survives and hence is presumbably more readily acceptable. Less developed countries and citizens can and perhaps should rely upon surviving children to support older parents. Insofar as security through children is practical governments should refrain from introducing financial systems of old age support that are premature given the development stage of the national economy. This strategy is comparable with the slow population growth rate necessary for accelerated economic development if life expectancies at birth are not very low. A national objective of lower mortality rates is compatible with reduced fertility for economic development and sufficient fertility for old age security. With lower mortality rates parents can achieve their old age insurance goals yet have their children late which means fewer children die that have to replaced. Spacing not only prevents unwanted births but also reduces the number of needed births.
Risk, uncertainty and family formation: The social context of poverty groups.
Abstract Despite the assumptions of many demographers that the net returns from children for non-elite groups in underdeveloped areas are likely to be negative, high fertility persists in most of these societies. Both cultural and institutional explanations have been proposed to account for this. We attempt to provide some mediation between these competing models, by introducing the elements of risk and uncertainty as factors likely to induce poverty and lead works to opt for the 'high fertility, low quality' pattern of investment of time and money in family formation. Drawing upon the work of Wharton in subsistence agriculture practices, several alternative decision-making models are proposed to account for both the persistence of high fertility, and the declines that have been registered in selected areas, such as Taiwan and perhaps China. The empirical work of Mueller on Taiwanese expectations of returns on children and the concomitant variation in family-size preferences is consistent with the models proposed. Some implications for uncertainty and risk-reduction strategies in family planning and other social welfare programmes are drawn.
The Use of Qualitative Information in Macro-Economic Policy Analysis
The majority of macro-economic policy models takes for granted that conflicts among objectives can be assessed by means of a tradeoff analysis. Such tradeoffs imply that sacrifices and benefits of various impacts of decisions can be measured on a cardinal scale, so that a conventional macro-economic utility or welfare analysis can be applied.