Bangladesh, a South Asian country with a population of approximately 175.7 million, is undergoing a critical phase of fertility transition. This study examines this phenomenon by analysing the relationship between the total fertility rate and several key determinants, including women’s enrolment in secondary education, their labor force participation, household income, the infant mortality rate, and the use of modern contraceptive methods. Using an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) regression applied with Error Correction model on time-series data from 1980 to 2024, the analysis shows that women’s education, women’s participation in labor force and usage of modern techniques in family planning significantly and negatively influence total fertility rate in long run, while improvement in childhood mortality significantly and positively influences the total fertility rate in long run. In the short run, women's education and usage of modern techniques in family planning show delayed positive influence on total fertility rate, while improvement in childhood mortality shows volatility and women’s participation in labor force does not show any influence. These findings provide important insights for policymakers and stakeholders, underscoring the need to expand daycare facilities, promote birth spacing, and strengthen the effectiveness of population policies.
This study explores the structural factors that differentiate the macroeconomic responses of Pakistan and a developed economy to domestic and global shocks within a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) framework. Using the model put forward in Gali & Monacelli (2005), we calibrated key parameters to reflect Pakistan’s economy, allowing for a comparative analysis of impulse response functions (IRFs) generated for output, inflation, interest rate, and exchange rate under (a) the labour productivity and (b) the world demand shock. In comparison with those for Canada – an advanced economy. The estimation of model parameters for Pakistan reveals relatively lower degree of openness, higher sensitivity of inflation to the output gap, lower price stickiness, lower coefficient of relative risk aversion (CRRA), lower disutility of labour supply and lower persistence of productivity shocks. These factors lead to a larger initial, however, less persistent monetary policy response than in Canada, higher inflation volatility, and shorter-lived benefits from productivity gains. Just to contextualise, if only the persistence of the positive productivity shock for Pakistan is equated to that of Canada, the output response more than doubles, highlighting the need for undertaking work on the most probable missing component i.e., the structural reforms for productivity enhancement.
The present study examines the relationship between household resilience in rural Bangladesh and different categories of mobile financial services (MFS) use, as reported and categorized based on survey respondents’ responses, following the COVID-19 shock. The study employed a convergent parallel mixed-methods design based on a survey of 300 households in Kurigram, Sunamganj, and Jhenaidah, 12 key informant interviews, and six focus group discussions. In the quantitative part of the study, users of MFS were split into regular users and occasional users, and then each group was compared with non-users. The specified 1:1 propensity-score matching algorithm failed to satisfy a balance criterion. Therefore, the main specification relied on propensity-score overlap weighting, covariate adjustment, and union-clustered standard errors. The use of MFS compared to non-use was associated with 17.42 percentage points lower decline of income, 2.51 points lower food-insecurity score, 14.06 percentage points lower probability of distress asset sale, and 3.88 fewer months to recovery among regular users. Only the decline of income was smaller among occasional users. No statistically significant gender- or income-based interactions were observed after correction for multiple testing. Exploratory decomposition did not support the hypothesized pathways through income smoothing and access to cash in emergencies. Fieldwork notes suggested same-day liquidity, shorter travel and waiting times, and challenges related to digital skills, internet stability, liquidity of agents, transaction fees, and trust. Results of the present study should be considered observational associations, rather than causal effects. Membership in the regular use category of MFS field-coded by field surveys was associated with better reported resilience outcomes, and it remains unclear whether MFS itself leads to such outcomes.
This study explores the economic and political determinants of external debt in 37 Asian developing and transition economies (ADTEs) over the period 1997-2020. Controlling for endogeneity and dynamic panel bias using fixed effects (LSDV), bias corrected LSDVC and Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) estimators, we find that economic growth, national savings, trade balance and strong institutional quality significantly reduce external debt. However, debt levels are exacerbated by investment, government consumption, inflation, interest rate, exchange rate, debt servicing and international reserves. The study underscores the importance of institutional quality in the pattern of borrowing, providing useful insights for policy-makers for sustainable debt management and long-term economic development.
Deteriorating child health impacts socioeconomic outcomes and is a critical concern. This study explores how the child nutrition is affected by the family size in Pakistan, utilising data of 4031 individuals from the Demographic Health Survey of Pakistan 2017-18. The indicators like height for age S score, weight for height S score, and weight for age S score are used to estimate child nutrition. To address endogeneity, instrumental variable approach is employed, and the family size is instrumented by gender of the first child (girl). The results show that if there is an increase in the family size the HAS score lowers by 0.19 SD and the probability of stunting increases by 4.2 percent while no significant impact is observed on WHS and WAS. However, if family size increases, it is also associated with a 3.1 percent increase in the child’s likelihood of being underweight. Hence, an increase in family size will have a long-term detrimental effect on children’s nutritional status.
