Protracted Armed Conflict and Fertility in Afghanistan

Although Afghanistan experienced a slight rise in female literacy and some decline in female and infant mortality between 2000 and 2015, these improvements were not great enough to explain the simultaneous dramatic drop in total fertility, from 7.5 to 4.6. Hence, in this study, I test the previously unverified hypothesis that long-term conflict has a negative causal impact on both fertility outcomes and fertility preferences. More specifically, by applying 2SRI GLM Poisson regressions to cross-sectional data for a subsample of ever-married women of reproductive age (15-49) combined with georeferenced information on district level conflict from 1979 to 2015, I estimate the causal impact on fertility of conflict experienced since the time of first union.

I find that although long-term conflict does indeed reduce the number of pregnancies and living children (through unbalanced sex ratios), when a woman’s ideal number of children desired over the lifetime is used as the dependent variable, conflict is a relatively small (albeit still statistically significant) determinant of fertility preferences. This finding implies that, given the only modest improvements in women’s health and development, the drop in Afghanistan’s total fertility rate would slow down if the conflict were to cease but general socioeconomic conditions did not significantly improve.

Speaker:

Dr. Hamid R. Oskorouchi is a research assistant in the field of household and consumer economics at the University of Hohenheim