Suchergebnisse

The extensive literature on population and development yielded few policy-relevant results before the discovery of the demographic dividend. This dividend refers to a rise in per capita income that results from an increase in workers per capita as a population's fertility declines. This paper describes the role of the demographic dividend in economic development in developing countries and summarizes policy options for strengthening the dividend. The first section reviews the demographic transition with an emphasis on its later phases when declining fertility and a changing population age structure produce the dividend. Next, the demographic drivers of the dividend and its potential impact on economic growth are examined. The last sections discuss policy options. Special attention is given to the role of voluntary family planning programs to meet rising demand for contraception thus accelerating the fertility decline and increasing the dividend when demand for smaller families is growing. The focus throughout is on sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the region that has experienced little demographic dividend but where the potential for a future dividend is greatest.

AbstractImprovements in health and mortality, known as the health transition, played important roles in the rise of modern contraceptive prevalence across countries. We describe key mechanisms and selected research evidence that show how health transitions helped shape contraceptive transitions around the world. Mechanisms include how decreases in child mortality rates affect the motivation to use contraception and how the organization and expansion of health care affect key barriers to contraceptive use. Substantial increases in child survival resulting from health transitions increase demand for deliberate fertility regulation and contraceptive use. Improved access to primary health care, particularly maternal and child health services and expansion into rural communities, was associated with increases in modern method use. Country‐specific policies that affected the organization and delivery of health care led to the dominance of particular modern methods in some countries. Empirical evidence is limited on how the quality of health care has affected aggregate level increases in modern method use. Using modern contraceptive prevalence to define the contraceptive transition reflects current data limitations but future research on the relationship of health transitions with macrolevel contraceptive prevalence trends may be able to incorporate more comprehensive aspects of how health transitions impact contraceptive choice and agency.