THE IMPACT OF THE POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC TRANSITION ON FERTILITY AND FAMILY FORMATION IN MONGOLIA

Abstract

Mongolia has never been a member of the USSR, but the collapse of the Soviet Union deeply affected this country. While a growing body of literature documents the consequences of this collapse on fertility and family formation behaviour for the former socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltic countries, Russia and Ukraine, and more recently, countries in Central Asia, Mongolia received only limited attention. This paper aims to fill this gap. As a consequence of the transition to democracy and a market economy, Mongolia experienced an impressive fertility reduction; total fertility fell from 4.6 children per woman to 2.5 between 1989 and 1993. Through the application of the synthetic parity progression ratios method to the 1998 Reproductive Health Survey data, this study analyses the reproductive responses of Mongolian couples in a context of deep social and economic changes. Paralleling other ex-socialist countries, it is shown that the transition affected the reproductive behaviour in Mongolia. Marriage declined discernibly for Mongolian women, but was shortly followed by a first birth. The changes took place at parities higher than two. These results suggest that people adjust their reproductive behaviour according to strongly-rooted cultural values that balance the standard economic motivations.

Keywords:

• fertility and family formation changes
• economic and political transition
• crisis
• Mongolia
• synthetic parity progression ratios

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Ricardo Neupert, Michel Oris, Gilbert Ritschard, T. Navch, B. Enkhstetseg, Mathias Lerch, Marion Burkimsher and three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and suggestions on previous versions of this text. This article was written at the Population Teaching and Research Center, School of Economic Studies, National University of Mongolia where the author stayed on academic leave (September 2007–January 2009) from the University of Geneva, Switzerland. The author would like to thank warmly his colleague at PTRC for their assistance. Financial supports from the Geneva–Asia Society, the General Fund of the University of Geneva, and the Boninchi Fundation are greatly acknowledged.

Notes

1. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations. Its contents has not been formally edited or cleared by the United Nations.

2. Access to abortion started in 1953, but was restricted, until 1985, to physical problems during pregnancy.

3. Whether or not the onset of fertility decline has been really caused by the relaxation of pro-natalist policies remain to be tested in the case of Mongolia. Evidence from Uzbekistan (Barbieri et al. 1996) suggests that the absence of family planning programmes and strong pro-natalist policies affected neither the onset of fertility decline nor the fertility transition. Social and health development programmes (education, and extensive health and medical care networks) have indeed played a more important role. In Mongolia, the simultaneity of the onset of fertility decline and the relaxation of strong pro-natalist policies gives a rather convincing ‘ready-to-use’ explanation to fertility decline. So far, this neat explanation has been limited in the literature (Aassve & Gereltuya 2002; Gereltuya et al. 2007). This consideration has overlooked, however, the fact that only intra-uterine devices (IUDs) were legalized in 1976, and that IUD insertion was restricted to cases when pregnancy was not recommended due to a woman's age or health, or when a woman already had five pregnancies (Gereltuya et al. 2007, p. 802; Neupert 1996, p. 36). This legalization was certainly based on maternal and child health considerations at a time when the Mongolian socialist government considered the small population as a major impediment to the country's economic development. Privileging the policy factor in the Mongolian fertility decline results in a narrow-minded or myopic consideration of Mongolian demographic history. Indeed, the start of the fertility decline during the 1970s certainly appears much more like an illustration of the classical demographic transition theory, which postulates a reproductive adjustment/response (fertility decline) to earlier mortality decline. According to Riley (2005), the onset of Mongolian mortality decline/health transition can be dated to the late 1940s to early 1950s. In every population experiencing mortality decline, life gains are primarily realized at young ages (childhood). About 20–25 years later, i.e. during the 1970s, Mongolian couples started to adjust their reproduction by bearing fewer children since the number of their surviving children has now increased. Such time-delays—indeed very short in comparison to the European experience—has been documented for numerous developing countries (Chesnais 1986).

4. Since the implementation of the first UNFPA programme in Mongolia (1992–1996), access to means of contraception are free of charge throughout the country at official local health centres.

5. In 2007 (not shown on Figure 1), a temporal rise in the period total fertility (2.3 children per woman) is registered in Mongolia (NSO data for 2007), but this fertility increase is likely to be temporal and will not likely persist. According to the Asian lunar calendar, 2007 was the year of the Golden Pig. Children, especially boys, born during this year will be prosperous and lucky. Many parents wanted to bear their child during this favourable year, producing henceforth a tempo distortion in fertility.

6. Even after having raised this limitation in data collection during the 2008 RHSM Stakeholders’ meeting held at the Corporate Hotel, Ulaanbaatar, on 21 March 2008, the National Statistical Office of Mongolia, together with the UNFPA, decided not to collect completed childbearing histories.

7. Such an assumption is made by diverse authors in their application of different event-history models to data collected in former socialist countries (for Mongolia, Aassve & Gereltuya 2002; for Kazakhstan, Agadjanian 1999; for Uzbekistan, Agadjanian & Makarova 2003). For example, in the case of Mongolia, ‘[s]ince 1991, internal migration level has suddenly increased owing to the beginning of the transition period from a centrally planned economy to a market oriented one. In 1991, the total number of migrants reached to 134.6 thousands, it means 5 times higher than that for the early 1980s’ (Solongo 2007, p. 3).

8. The term parity refers to the number of children a woman has already had, and should be distinguished from the term birth order, which denotes the number of children a woman has by their order of appearance. The idea of the PPRs was first introduced by Louis Henry in 1953 and re-discovered later, independently of the work of Henry, by Feeney (see Feeney 1983; Feeney & Yu 1987) and Ní Bhrochláin (1987).

9. Never-married women aged 45–49 reached 3.8 per cent in 1979 and 4.1 per cent in 1989 (NSO 2002, pp. 10–11).

10. In some countries of Eastern Europe, long-term childbearing postponement was observed shortly after the end of socialism (Sobotka 2003).

11. As the 2006 and 2007 fertility was likely to be biased due to tempo-effect, these years are not considered.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thomas Spoorenberg

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