Economic motives for family limitation

Abstract Taiwan can boast one of the most rapid rates of economic development in the world over the past 20 years. Taiwan is also in the midst of the demographic transition. The nature of the connection between economic development and the onset and progress of the fertility decline is far from clear, however. Rather than explore the relation between income and fertility change, this paper will be concerned with some of the economic motivations which may be responsible for fertility decline during the demographic transition. Inquiries in this area have been handicapped by having to rely on aggregative or on household data which included only a very limited set of economic variables (other than income) along with demographic data. In order to re-examine the linkages between economic change and fertility change at the family level, a special survey was conducted in Taiwan in 1969. While recognizing that economic factors are not wholly, perhaps not even primarily, responsible for the lowering of the birth rate, the central interest of this paper is the complex of cost and benefit considerations which may contribute to a decline of the rate, using the new data for Taiwan.