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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - IFAMID (Institutional Family Demography)

Teaser

Summary

IFAMID presents a new framework for the analysis of family demography. Building on sociology and political science, we argue that trends in family formation (e.g. fertility) only in part derives from broad global forces (e.g. new technology, expansion in education, broad changes in attitudes and values and secularization). Equally important to understand demographic trends, is to analyze what happens when these global forces meet local social norms and rigid institutional structures. The framework is consistent with the view that as global forces spread across societies, those forces will create losers and winners - depending on the features of those societies. These societal features will either be conducive to positive trends, or they can hold back progress - if those features do not cohere with the global forces.

Why is this important? Other than providing a new understanding of demographic trends, the insights from this project matter directly for policy making. An optimal policy design need to take into account those cultural and institutional features, which may otherwise hamper the effectiveness of the very policy proposed. As such, this project offers a new perspective on policy design.

The objectives of this project is to first demonstrate the way cultural and institutional rigidity matter for demographic trends. Following this statement, the second objective is to recognize that there is no single over encompassing feature that matter for all demographic trends of all societies. The nature of those cultural traits may very well differ across societies, but yet lead to similar outcomes and trends. Consequently, an important objective of this project is to investigate which type of cultural trait matter for explaining demographic trends across a broad specter of outcomes and societies. Finally, global forces also comes in different forms. Expansion in education is taking place on a broad scale across most societies. Higher education among women, is the strongest predictor of fertility decline. But, as education expands, it interacts with societal norms and culture, meaning that in some societies education appears to bring fertility almost a halt, whereas other societies managed to maintain high fertility. The reason behind these diverging trends comes about because those soecieities differ from a cultural perspective, where certain cultural traits is conducive of high female education and high fertility - other are not.

Work performed

As envisaged in the original research proposal, the first part of the project, has been intensive in terms of data collection. The IFAMID team has been working closely with the Global Family Change project lead by Hans-Peter Kohler (University of Pennsylvania), to construct a unified framework that harmonizes sub-national regions for all its 300 plus DHS surveys. This means that we have been able to match variables from other external data sources, such as the barometer surveys, to the DHS surveys. This is a major contribution, and the team is now working on making the script publicly available. The implication is that information from other data sources can be easily merged, but importantly, it can be done so at level of sub-national regions. This is a significant benefit for statistical analysis, since with this data source we can assess variation within country, and as surveys have been repeated over time, we can control for fixed country and regional effects. To exemplify, with this data, we have estimated the effects of corruption, as derived from the Afrobarometer survey, on individualsâ€™ contraceptive behaviour. Whereas corruption is clearly detrimental for the take-up of modern contraception, we also find that it has important implications for social inequality. In the realm of this project, we are also developing ways of matching surveys by using geocoded locations. For instance, respondents in the DHS surveys are geocoded, and in one application we match this code with all Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) from China. In this way, we are able to get unprecedented precision of the effect of Chinese FDI on demographic behaviour and trends. The team is in this very moment developing further extensions of this work. For instance, also the Barometer surveys contain geocoded locations of their respondents. As with the DHS, these observations can be matched with Aid-data and data on historical conflicts.

The Trustlab project as described in the previous report, was successfully implemented, and the data is now being analysed in collaboration with the other country partners. The results of these surveys have been presented in many conferences and seminars. The Trustlab project has so far been highly successful, but also contributed to some extent to the current delay.

We have collected data from sub regional levels across Europe, and we are developing several lines of research coherent with the original research proposal. We have focused in on Italy, in particular, since we are able to obtain exceptionally detailed data over time at the municipality level (8000 of them). These data sources are also matched with information collected through the Trustlab project. As described in the previous report, we have made a big effort in collecting historical data across Europe. This data collection effort has now come to an end, and they are being matched with current information, so to investigate to what extent the historical context has mattered for current day demographic trends.

Final results

In general, the conceptual idea of the project, that trends can be explained in terms of considering the interaction between global forces and local cultural traits (or structural rigidity) is being given a lot praise. It is an exciting and promising framework of analysis.