Determinants of fertility rate decline in the south asian countries: A panel data approach

Over the last three decades fertility rate declines substantially all over the world. The aim of this study is to investigate the macroeconomic determinants of fertility rate decline in the South Asian countries. Data are taken from seven south Asian countries named Bangladesh, India, Sri-Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan, Bhutan and Maldives over the period of 1990-2015. Breusch-Pagan, Honda, King-Wu, Standardized Honda and Standardized King-Wu Lagrange Multiplier test confirm there exists cross-section effects. Hausman test confirms that fixed effect model is appropriate for empirical analysis for this study. But Breusch-Pagan LM test, Pesaran scaled LM test and Baltagi, Feng, and Kao bias-corrected scaled LM test confirm that there exist cross-sectional dependence in residuals. Therefore, Panel Corrected Standard Error (PCSE) model has been employed to get the unbiased estimators. Empirical results of PCSEmodel confirm that per capita GNI, Female labor force participation rate, Education, Infant mortality rate, and urbanization have statistically significant impact on fertility rate in the south Asian countries. Empirical results reveal that increase of per capita GNI, female labor force participation rate, education, and urbanization will cause to decline fertility rate, while decline of infant mortality rate will cause to decline it, which is in accordance with our theoretical expectation. Therefore, we expect that to control the population growth rate policy makers should take these factors under their consideration.