Oxford University Press, 2001
176 pages, 20 figures, 216mm x 138mm
ISBN 0-19-924459-6
Order your own copy: OUP, Amazon.com
Inside the cover...
Considerable controversy exists among demographers, economists and
sociologists over the causes of fertility change in developing and
developed countries. The neoclassical economic approach to fertility
is embraced by its supporters because it facilitates the application
of sophisticated consumer and household production theory to one of
the most private and intimate questions: a couple's reproductive
behavior. Despite the theoretical appeal of the economic approach, it
has been eschewed by many critics because of its lack of social and
institutional context, its neglect of cultural factors and its
requirements of 'rationality'. The integration of social interaction
with economic fertility models in this book emerges as a powerful tool
to overcome many of these criticisms. First the analysis provides a
formal integration of economic, sociological and other approaches to
fertility and shows that there is a useful and promising agenda at the
intersection of these schools. The second and more important goal is
to sharpen the analytic lens with which theorists from different
schools investigate fertility. For economists the work shows the
advantages of moving beyond individual decision making and embedding
the fertility decisions in a 'local environment' with interpersonal
information flows, 'atmospheric' or social externalities, norms and
customs. For sociologists this work intends to show that the
theorizing about the interaction in social network can be more
sophisticated. The implications of social networks depend
substantially on the specific contexts and stages of the demographic
transition, and these differences can be used to empirically
distinguish between social learning and social influence. Thirdly, the
findings have important implications for population policy. The
analyses in this book show when family planning is likely to diffuse
and lead to rapid adoption of birth control, and they derive
conditions when Pareto-improving policy measures are likely to exist.
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