The proposed research will investigate the social, economic, and policy influences on the long-run declines in fertility in Indonesia and Peninsular Malaysia, with special attention to the relative roles of socioeconomic change and of public programs and policies. Although these two countries have some important cultural similarities, by most demographic and economic measures they are at very different stages of socioeconomic development. Surprisingly, however, the current levels and historical patterns of fertility in these two countries are very similar. The proposed work will use the long time span of household-level information available in the Malaysian Family Life Surveys (MFLS) and the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) to assess the relative contributions to fertility decline of changes in income, mortality rates, earnings opportunities of women, the cost and availability of education, and access to efficient methods of fertility regulation. The analysis will also explicitly investigate intergenerational influences on fertility, which have received attention in some theoretical models, but have received very little attention in empirical studies. The rich MFLS and IFLS micro-level data on demographic, social, and economic variables on more than one generation allow empirical testing of the implications of these intergenerational models. The juxtaposition of the experiences of these two countries that have experienced extensive socioeconomic change over time will allow us to observe how differences in the path or rate of change in demographic and economic conditions influence fertility at comparable levels of development.
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