PARTITIONING THE EFFECT OF INFANT AND CHILD-DEATH ON SUBSEQUENT FERTILITY - AN EXPLORATION IN BANGLADESH

A method of partitioning the fertility impact of infant and child deat h into two components - a physiological and a behavioural effect - is proposed by use of the Cox hazard model with three dummy variables tha t indicate the time of child death and the status of breastfeeding wit h reference to the return of menstruation postpartum. An application o f the method to the 1991 Bangladesh Contraceptive Prevalence Survey da ta suggests that the effect from the physiological mechanism outweighe d the effect from the behaviourial mechanism (the former effect raisin g the hazard of an additional birth by nearly 90 per cent). It appears that the effect of a child death declined over time and an early cess ation of breastfeeding was not the sole cause for invoking the physiol ogical mechanism. The risk of childbirth rose sharply among the educat ed if their children died, although the main effect of education itsel f was to reduce the risk.