Working Paper
Culture and the Fertility Transition in India

The paper examines the evidence for various explanations usually offered for the differences in fertility behaviour across regions and over time in India. Female education has been found in other research to be the single most important factor driving the fall in fertility, but there are wide differences in the level and pace of decline of fertility at the same educational level in different states. The study makes use of two data sets, one deriving from the National Sample Survey and the Sample Registration System, the other using cultural characteristics from the Anthropological Survey of India. It examines the proposition that differences in cultural norms affect fertility behaviour and that these effects operate in counter-intuitive ways through their impact on other economic variables. The results offer strong support for this hypothesis and suggest that the effects of the usual variables like income and human capital investment are mediated through the differences in cultural traits across Indian states. Finally, the results are used to conduct a simulation exercise which examines what the counterfactual increase in the total fertility rate would be if the different regions were endowed with the mean level of literacy or consumption or cultural traits. The exercise demonstrates that if the north had the mean level of cultural traits, total fertility rates would be 6 per cent lower than they are today, while if the south had been held to the dominant norms of the country at large, fertility rates would be 25 per cent higher than they are. It is striking that literacy has a low impact on fertility outcomes relative to the importance of both cultural traits and levels of consumption.