Factors Affecting Contraceptive Use in Sub-Saharan Africa (1993) / Chapter Skim
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Appendix A: Adapting the Easterlin-Crimmins Synthesis Model to Sub-Saharan Conditions
Appendix A: Adapting the Easterlin-Crimmins Synthesis Model to Sub-Saharan Conditions
Pages 221-229
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From page 221... ...
If the potential supply of births exceeds the quantity demanded, there exists a motivation for contraceptive use. Thus, the model draws together three essential elements: reproductive capacity, the demand for reproductive outcomes, and the principal means contraception by which couples bring actual reproductive outcomes into agreement with their reproductive desires.
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From page 222... ...
One could include breastfeeding intensity and duration in this third category, together with postpartum sexual abstinence, participation in a reproductive union, and spousal separation. The degree of erogeneity displayed by such behaviors will depend on the length of the decision period in question and on the specific character of the economic, social, and cultural organization.
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From page 223... ...
The differences in these underlying motivations would emerge in the subsequent sequence of decision periods, as the utility penalty associated with conception progressively declines for birth spacers while (presumably) remaining constant for birth averters.
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From page 224... ...
In some socioeconomic circumstances where one might expect husband-wife conflicts, it might prove useful to distinguish among contraceptive methods according to the degree of spouse cooperation they entail. SUPPLY OF BIRTHS As indicated above, the supply of births that influences decisions about contraceptive use is affected by proximate determinants that are clearly exogenous, such as individual fecundability; those that can be treated as exogenous only in the short run, such as spouse separation; and possibly determinants such as breastfeeding and postpartum abstinence, whose exogeneity is in doubt.
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From page 225... ...
Consider a prevalence calculation in which the base comprises all nonpregnant women and nonuse is distinguished from use of various contraceptive methods. If we decide to group breastfeeding and abstinence with other conventional contraceptive measures, we must at the same time recognize their highly distinctive patterns of adoption and discontinuation, and for breastfeeding, a contraceptive failure rate that is strongly dependent on duration.4 To be correctly interpreted, contraceptive prevalence rates that incorporate breastfeeding and abstinence would have to be calculated by holding constant the duration since last birth.
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From page 226... ...
But economists have also recognized the difficulties in statistical applications of conditional demand theory, given that the theoretically appropriate conditional demand functions will typically include a number of variables that are not subject to empirical measurement. Thus, an empirical application of conditional demands will be vulnerable to the charge of selectivity bias arising from omitted variables.
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From page 227... ...
concerning empirical applications of the synthesis model. Easterlin defends his empirical specification of the model in terms of conditional demand theory (although he does not use this language)
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From page 228... ...
Second, one could assert that when the data are grouped according to specific socioeconomic or cultural criteria, so little individual-specific variation remains in Pi that it is, in effect, absorbed into the constant terms of the regression equations, which is the essence of the argument that proceeds from the assertion that postpartum abstinence and breastfeeding are "culturally determined," to the conclusion that one can examine contraceptive use on a conditional basis.8 We wish to underscore this point: To justify using the conditional approach, one or the other of these arguments must be applied to each of the other proximate determinants, including marital status and spouse separation. These analytic and statistical complications surrounding the synthesis framework are not beyond resolution, but to address the issues in full in this report would carry us into new and possibly controversial terrain with regard to' methodology.
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From page 229... ...
Breastfeeding and abstinence are treated as potentially endogenous; we do not calculate contraceptive prevalence measures conditional on breastfeeding and abstinence status. But neither do we merge breastfeeding and abstinence with other contraceptive methods.
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