ABSTRACT

The idea that the onset of a broad fertility decline is associated with the exposure of a substantial fraction of the population to modern systems of social, economic and value organisation has extensive antecedents in the ‘threshold hypothesis’ popular in the 1950s and 1960s [ United Nations, 1963 ]. From this idea several authors have drawn the implication that development strategies which promote the participation of the largest possible fraction of the people in the process of modernisation will best accomplish the goal of rapid reduction in the birth rate [ Rich, 1973; Kocher, 1974 ]. William Rich has succintly stated this idea:

The shift in attitude toward reduced births is, rather, a function of a combination of environmental changes that affect the orientation of families enough to alter fertility decisions. In a developing country, this appears to occur when families begin to participate significantly in the modern social, political, and economic systems. Thus nations in which only a small elite constitutes the modern sector while the majority of the population continues to live at the subsistence level and to maintain its traditional way of life are not likely to experience reduced national fertility as readily as those countries which bring about mass participation in the development process [ Rich, 1973: 9].

From this point it is not far to the hypothesis that the distribution of income within a country will be closely related to its fertility rate. The missing step is only the recognition that to hold modern attitudes and values it is necessary that people participate in modern systems, and that if people do so participate they will acquire the corresponding attitudes [ Inkeles and Smith, 1974 ]. Participation in modern life, or even sustained aspirations to do so, requires that people have the means to partake of a variety of consumption activities, to invest in themselves and their children, to be concerned with more than day-by-day subsistence, to come in contact with a broader range of experience. And, conversely, rising living standards draw people into contact with a wider range of modern systems from which at deeper levels of poverty they had been effectively excluded. In other words, over certain ranges at least, rising income levels might be both necessary and sufficient for the process of modernisation underlying fertility declines. At least, changes in income might play a key role in facilitating and stimulating the process of modernisation. This notion is fully consistent with the idea that among households within the modern sector, those already extensively participating in modern social and economic systems, changes in income might play a negligible or even reversed role in inducing fertility changes.