Demographic and Socio-economic Characteristics Impact on Fertility in Pakistan

Abstract

Fertility is the actual reproductive performance of an individual, a couple which determines the country’s population size. Pakistan is the 5th most Populus country in the world with high fertility rate in regional countries. The trustworthy secondary data were taken from National Institute of Population Studies, Pakistan and analyzed. The mean and standard deviation of children ever born (CEB) was estimated 3.2±2.41. Poisson and logistic regression models were applied to study the substantial role of eight socio-economic and demographic variables regarding CEB. Poisson regression illustrated that contraceptive and length of marriage positively correlated with CEB, whereas the women education, age at marriage and wealth index showed an inverse relationship with CEB. The women education i.e., illiterate, primary education, secondary education and higher education is 50%, 13.9%, 20.8% and 15.3% and the corresponding mean CEB are 2.73, 2.48, 2.34, and 2.16, respectively. The logistic regression model demonstrated the negative relation between the odds ratio and women education and age at marriage while the family size and length of the marriage were found to be positively correlated. If the respondent remains married for 10+ years, the odds ratio of having a large family is increased by a factor of 21.352 keeping the effect of other variables kept constant. The fitted parsimonious logistic regression model’s correct classification for small family, large family and overall are 82.3%, 83% and 82.7% respectively. The findings, thus, have enormous implications for the Government and Population welfare Departments about policies formulations