Family planning and fertility decline in rural Iran: the impact of rural health clinics

✍ Scribed by Djavad Salehi-Isfahani; M. Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi; Meimanat Hosseini-Chavoshi

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 302 KB
• Volume: 19
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1057-9230
• DOI: 10.1002/hec.1613

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

During the first few years of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and aided by pro‐natal government policies, Iranian fertility was on the rise. In a reversal of its population policy, in 1989, the government launched an ambitious and innovative family planning program aimed at rural families. By 2005, the program had covered more than 90% of the rural population and the average number of births per rural woman had declined to replacement level from about 8 births in the mid 1980s. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of a particular feature of the program – health houses – on rural fertility, taking advantage of the variation in the timing of their construction across the country. We use three different methods to obtain a range of estimates for the impact of health houses on village‐level fertility: difference‐in‐differences (DID), matching DID, and length of exposure. We find estimates of impact ranging from 4 to 20% of the decline in fertility during 1986–1996. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.