Ideas, Economics and 'the Sociology of Supply': Explanations for Fertility Decline in Bangladesh
分析孟加拉国在贫困背景下生育率持续高企及近年急剧下降的原因，批判物质主义解释，强调社会经济变化是家庭规模偏好改变的主要动力，同时承认现代计划生育在加速生育率下降中的作用。
The persistence of high rates of fertility in Bangladesh, despite the poverty of its population, has been given alternative, and apparently competing, explanations, including the absence of effective forms of family planning, the resilience of pro-natalist values and norms and the existence of material constraints which led to the reliance on children as economic assets. The recent and dramatic declines in fertility rates, in the absence of any apparent major economic changes in the decades prior to the onset of fertility decline, appears to contradict materialist explanations for fertility behaviour and to support explanations which stressed ideas about the acceptability of birth control and the availability of the means for doing so. This article argues that such an interpretation is based on an historical analysis of events in Bangladesh. It offers an alternative explanation which stresses socio-economic change as the primary motor for change in family size preferences, but which recognises the role of modern forms of family planning in facilitating the pace of the resulting fertility decline.