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Future low fertility prospects in Mongolia? An evaluation of the factors that support having a child

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Abstract

With 2.59 children per woman in 2008, Mongolia appears today as an exception in East Asia where fertility rates are far below the replacement level. Moreover, from its historical nadir of 1.95 children per women in 2005, fertility is on the rise. This paper first presents recent fertility development in Mongolia. Second, based on the experiences of European and East Asian countries, factors contributing to the development of low fertility are discussed in reference to the Mongolian context. Most of these factors are indeed found in Mongolia and could probably contribute to reducing fertility in the future. However, the country also presents cultural-family practices and recently-adopted fertility-family incentives which may support and stabilize fertility rates. These recent fertility-incentives factors and policies adopted by the Government of Mongolia are discussed in the final part from the perspective of equity, efficiency, and efficacy proposed by McDonald (2006b, “An assessment of policies that support having children from the perspectives of equity, efficiency and efficacy”, Vienna Yearbook of Population Research 2006, Special issue on ‘Postponement of childbearing on Europe’, 213–234). The aim is to determine if these measures are efficient to counterbalance and cancel out the depressing fertility effects.

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Notes

  1. Use of oral contraceptives was forbidden in 1969 in Mongolia, 5 years earlier than in the USSR (Neupert 1994, p. 18).

  2. From 1943 to 1985, abortion was highly restricted and could be practised only in cases of health problems.

  3. It should be noted however that some of these measures (monthly and quarterly allocations for each Mongolian child under the age of 18) were first adopted with the objective of poverty reduction (UNICEF 2007).

  4. While one could have feared that these measures were related only to populist political discourses and actions adopted during the campaign for the Parliamentary election of 29 June 2008, they have not been revised so far by the newly formed Government and Parliament. Indeed, they reflect and express a large political consensus.

  5. Data for the first 7 months of 2009 indicate that the number of (live) births keeps increasing (NSO data).

  6. ‘new living arrangements, and cohabitation (premarital or postmarital) in particular, were not solely the outcomes of changing socioeconomic conditions or rising female employment, but equally the expression of secular and anti-authoritarian sentiments of better-educated men and women who held an egalitarian world view, placed greater emphasis on Maslow’s (1954) “higher order needs” (i.e., self-actualization, individualistic and expressive orientations, need for recognition), and, to use Inglehart’s term (1970, 1990), had stronger “postmaterialist” political orientations’ (Lesthaeghe and Neidert 2006, p. 669, italics added).

  7. Parents have invested more in the education of their daughters, considering that boys will always be eager to find a job in livestock activities in rural areas. The privatization of livestock in 1992 played a significant role in the development of the reverse gender gap in education; boys were expected to look after the newly-acquired family herd and were less likely to be sent to school. In 2005, as the result of this Mongolian educational specificity, 162 women for 100 men were pursuing higher education : the highest figure in Asia, far higher than any other East Asian countries (ESCAP 2007, p. 70).

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Acknowledgments

This is a revised version of a paper presented at the international conference Low Fertility and Reproductive Health in East and Southeast Asia, Tokyo, 12–14 November 2008. We would like to thank V. Skirbekk for his discussion of the paper at the conference. We acknowledge also the comments of two anonymous reviewers contributing to the improvement of this paper. The first author would like to thank the Geneva-Asia Society, the General Fund of the University of Geneva, and the Boninchi Foundation for their support during his stay at the Population Teaching and Research Center, School of Economic Studies, National University of Mongolia from September 2007 to January 2009.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Population Estimates and Projections Section, Population Division, DESA, United Nations, New York, NY, USA

    Thomas Spoorenberg

  2. Population Teaching and Research Center, School of Economic Studies, National University of Mongolia, Ulan Bator, Mongolia

    Byambaa Enkhtsetseg

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  1. Thomas Spoorenberg
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  2. Byambaa Enkhtsetseg
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Correspondence to Thomas Spoorenberg.

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

Thomas Spoorenberg was formerly at the University of Geneva, Switzerland.

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Spoorenberg, T., Enkhtsetseg, B. Future low fertility prospects in Mongolia? An evaluation of the factors that support having a child. J Pop Research 26, 227–247 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12546-009-9017-2

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