EXPLORATIONS INTO THE FERTILITY TRANSITION AND FEMALE LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION IN BANGLADESH
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Date
2024-08-07
Authors
Siddiqui, SM Shihab
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
This dissertation is comprised of three papers. Together, they investigate aspects of the fertility and female labor force transition in Bangladesh that started in the 1960s and continuing today. The dissertation is organized as follows:
Chapter 1 summarizes the context, and provides an overview of the three research chapters. Chapter 2 analyzes the effect of increased industrial work opportunity on women's employment, reproductive behavior, and human capital accumulation. Using shift-share instrument, I find that increased industrial work opportunity increased women's employment significantly and reduced human capital accumulation very modestly among teenage girls. However, there was no effect on reproductive behavior.
Chapter 3 provides the first comprehensive construction, to the best of my knowledge, of completed birth estimates of Bangladeshi women who were born all the way back in 1920. This exercise shows that the rural fertility transition begun with the 1945-50 cohort, within five years of the fertility transition in urban areas. I then present suggestive evidence that agrarian economic conditions, mediated by land availability, was a driver of the transition.
Chapter 4 (co-authored with Shankha Chakraborty) utilizes Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions to examine why the female labor force participation rate has increased more in Bangladesh compared to contiguous Indian states since 1990s. We find that while women's education is positively associated with employment in Bangladesh, the reverse is true in the selected Indian states. We also find some evidence that women's relative education compared to men's has been an important factor in explaining this. Chapter 5 concludes the dissertation.
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Keywords
Bangladesh, Female Labor Force Participation, Fertility, Garment Industry, Industrialization, Rural