The examples of France and Bangladesh are offered principally to show that fertility decline

can begin at low income and well before industrialization.

proceeds more slowly in rural societies than in urban ones.

is usually reversed once incomes rise substantially.

depends on the availability of modern contraception.

According to the passage, the strongest statistical predictor of when a region's fertility decline begins is

the region's level of child mortality.

the proportion of women in paid employment.

the rate of growth in household incomes.

The oil-exporting states are mentioned in order to provide a case in which

fertility fell despite incomes remaining low.

incomes rose sharply while fertility remained high.

fertility and income both remained unchanged for a generation.

fertility rose alongside rising incomes.

It can be inferred that a government which treated income growth as the principal instrument of fertility policy would, in the author's view,

succeed, but more slowly than one using other instruments.

achieve nothing, since income plays no causal role.

misjudge its levers where the binding constraint is normative rather than material.

find its policy effective only in societies that are already urban.

The passage identifies each of the following as part of the standard explanation of fertility decline EXCEPT

the rising cost of raising and educating children.

declining child mortality reducing the births needed for a desired family size.

the spread of expectations from one language community to a neighbouring one.

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The Fertility Transition and the Limits of Income

PRACTICE

100:00+4 −1MCQ Single Answer

Reading Passage

Almost everywhere that incomes have risen substantially, birth rates have fallen. The standard explanation follows the household budget. As economies industrialize, children stop being a source of farm labour and become a long and expensive investment; falling child mortality means fewer births are needed to reach a desired family size; and rising education and employment for women raise the cost of the years that childbearing occupies. On this account the fertility transition is something development does to a society, and income is the lever. The historical record is untidier than the account allows. Fertility in France began falling in the second half of the eighteenth century, generations before industrialization, while the country was still overwhelmingly poor and rural. Bangladesh's birth rate fell steeply through decades in which incomes remained very low. Several oil-exporting states, meanwhile, grew wealthy quickly and saw fertility stay high for a generation afterwards. More striking than any individual case is what predicts the timing best across many of them: the single strongest statistical signal for when a region's decline begins is not its income but whether an adjacent region sharing its language has already begun. That points toward the movement of ideas and expectations across a cultural boundary rather than toward the arithmetic of the household. None of this makes income irrelevant. Rising incomes create the schooling, the health systems and the employment that make smaller families both possible and attractive, and across large groups of countries the correlation holds well enough to be useful. What the anomalies establish is narrower: that the moment a decline begins is not set by income, and that policy which assumes otherwise will reach for the wrong instruments. Where the binding constraint is what a community expects rather than what a household can afford, making contraception available and keeping girls in school does more than raising incomes on its own.

The main point of the passage is that income