Demographic change in rural Bangladesh

Empirical evidences from village surveys reveal that, despite rural-urban migration, the number of households in the sample villages increased, on average, at 3.0 per cent per annum during the last two decades. Needless to mention, demographic pressure and separation of household members have seemingly contributed to this change. Again, although the number of households has increased over time, members per household (household size) have monotonically declined from 5.86 in 1988 to 4.93 in recent years- a decline by less than 1.0 per cent per annum. The household structure further shows a decline in the proportion of children, although the decline has slowed down in recent years. The findings, by and large, indicate that it is both rural-urban migration and a reduction in fertility that contributed to slowing down the growth of population. And quite obviously, the reduction in population growth is a significant positive factor in the development of the rural economy. There is the drastic reduction in the proportion of older children (10-15 years) and the younger children fingers at the falling mortality rate. And falling mortality rate implies an increase in life expectancy. Second, the proportion of economically active population has increased over time. The trend seems to be decisively true for the age group 16-50 years, who we can identify as the most active labor force. The fall in the proportion of people at the lower end of the pyramid provides us with a sigh of relief somewhat as the dependency rate is reducing. But, increased working-age population at the same time carries a tension for policy makers as jobs need to be created for the expanding labour force. Finally, we observe that the proportion of people aged 60 plus has significantly gone up over time. In this case, we reason that improvement in health care services and expansion of health facilities might have played a role. Of course and undeniably, the provisions put an additional pressure on devising a social security system for the old people, as the traditional joint family that has protected their livelihoods has been giving way to nuclear family. Also in some households, the children no longer look after parents in their old age. In any society, the ratio of children (0-4) to women of child bearing age (15-49), called the Child-Woman ratio, is generally considered as a measure of the current fertility rate. If the ratio gets bigger, implying a rise in infants per woman, the bitter it appears as the fertility rate is assumed to have gone up. Of course, the reverse indicates a decline in current fertility. Therefore, in a society faced with tremendous population pressure, a rise in the infant-women ratio is treated as a curse while a decline is considered to be a blessing. It may be mentioned here that we observed a severe problem of age rounding at age five and 10 from the age reporting in our data. So we measured the Child -Woman Ratio as the proportion of children in the age group 0 to 5 to women in the age group 16-49. There has been a sharp decline in fertility rate during the comparable periods from 74 per cent in 1988 to about 48 per cent in 2004. This indicates a decline by 2.1 per cent per annum over the entire period. And possibly for this reason, as also mentioned before, the average number of children per household rapidly declined and household size has squeezed somewhat. But, compared to the earlier decade when the rate fell by 4.7 per cent, the rate of deceleration reached 2.3 per cent in the most recent decade. This may indicate that the decline in fertility has lost its earlier momentum, possibly, owing to the lack of emphasis on population control in recent times. Is the decline in the fertility rate related to socio-economic factors such as the level of education of the household head or the spouse and the size of landownership of the family which, in turn, determine the level of household income? Because, educated heads are more likely to understand the economic ramifications of small family size and, hence, attempt to keep fertility rate low. But the information from the field seems to belie our belief as we observe relatively high fertility rates among the households with educated heads during earlier periods. Of course, between 2000 and 2004, the relationship between the two variables becomes visible with falling fertility rates among households of educated heads. However, we can cite two reasons for such a negative correlation: first, the educated heads always remain aware about the advantages of small family (and disadvantages of large family). Second, educated household members have more work opportunities that keep the opportunity costs of caring for children relatively high. These two forces work to influence the decisions in favour of a small family. Our observation on this is further reinforced when we hear that, the government, non-government organisations (NGOs) and various social organisations have been undertaking educational programmes and news papers and media have been seriously engaged in propagating programmes for population control. However, available evidences contrarily show that the education of housewives is not having that much influence on fertility rate. In other words, educational status of women, especially of housewives, did not affect fertility either in the base year or afterwards. The unexpected outcome could be due to the fact that, in the patriarchal rural society, the decision about babies generally comes from the male side and women's views are rarely respected. And finally the sharp decline in the fertility rates of the functionally landless households proves that these households have growingly become aware about population control. As it could be observed, there had been a substantial decline in the share of young population in rural households during the last two decades - from about 45 per cent to 33 per cent. The largest decline is depicted by population aged 10 years and above. However, we can glance at the growth from land ownership scale and submit two important observations: first, poor households have relatively more young population. Definitely this is not good news as growing young population becomes a burden on the households in the face of fixed number of earning members. Second, notwithstanding land ownership, the share of young population has declined over time across all households. For example, in 1988, young population comprised roughly 45 per cent of the total members in the household; the share dropped to 33 per cent in 2004 . For poor households, this trend is very much comforting as they can now devote the surplus resources to relatively more productive activities. Had the rate of growth not fallen, these households would have to spend more on food, housing, health and education. Likewise, poor households have also witnessed appreciable decline in the share of population further down the pyramid . Thus, opportunities seem to have arisen when the resource spent earlier on primary education could be diverted towards more productive pockets. The policy implication of such development is that the government need not have to increase investments on infrastructure for primary education because children of primary-school going age have substantially declined over time. The share of population - generally considered as working age group and aged 16-60 - appears to have increased over time. The rate of growth in this case is estimated to be 1.2 per cent per annum. At disaggregated level, the largest increase is evidenced for 41-60 age groups. As noted before, the rise in the share of this group turns out to be a blessing, as working members manage bread and butter for the households. Perhaps, as a result of this growth the dependency ratio has fallen over time. Available evidences show, as also discussed earlier, that the dependency ratio now stands at 174 per cent as against 208 per cent in the base year. This drastic reduction in the dependency ratio could be considered as the most remarkable demographic change in rural perspectives. Needless to mention that the rapid fall in population growth rate has contributed to this improvement. And finally, a reduction in dependency ratio has capacitated the households to divert the limited resources towards alternative productive pursuits. Abdul Bayes is a Professor of Economics at Jahangirnagar University. His email Address:abdulbayes@yahoo.com. This write-up has been prepared on the basis of findings and observations, presented in a book, Rural Economy and Livelihoods:Insights from Bangladesh, by Mahabub Hossain and Abdul Bayes