http://www.erf.org.eg/nletter/May98-03.asp
SOME ECONOMIC & POLITICAL ISSUES IN FERTILITY TRANSITION IN THE MENA REGION by Youssef Courbage Introduction Aggregate fertility in MENA has now (1998) fallen below 3.5 children per woman. Among women educated to secondary level in some countries (Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, Turkey, Iran) it is now below replacement level. This is an undeniable trend, for the region has had, rightly or wrongly, a reputation for opposition to change - in this case in the shape of an unbridled birthrate. Up to the seventies, Arab and Iranian demographics seemed isolationist, bastions of natural fertilities and resistant to family change. Turkey, however was more receptive to change. Today the odd blips in the decline are merely the trees hiding the forest of fundamental change. An atypical transition Fertility transition has followed a different path from what might have been expected. Classical models of transition offer little illumination for countries individually or in groups. Morocco's early-onset fertility transition, for example, cannot be accounted for by any trigger of change whatever. The standard of living was and is low. The population was mainly rural then, and is little less so today. At the onset of transition in 1975, most adults were illiterate; that is still the case today (50 percent). Low school enrollment persists today: 62 percent in 1994. Women's status is still insecure (high excess girlchild mortality rate, low female enrollment rate, marriage, divorce, legal status, political life...). Infant mortality trends do not adequately account for the progress of transition, characterized by no decisive breakthrough or epidemiologic revolution. And yet it is 82 percent along the road towards the final stage of fertility transition, but barely halfway (56 percent) towards the infant mortality rates of developed countries. The converse also holds true for other countries - like Egypt, Syria, the Gulf States, Iran - where fertility remained stubbornly high despite declining infant mortality, a rising enrollment ratio, a decrease in illiteracy, rising incomes and consumption. Emergence from a rent economy: the driving force of fertility transition What distinguishes this transition and its date of onset is the key role played by oil. Economies throughout the region were directly or indirectly infused with oil revenue, which offset the potential determinants of a decline. Also, in societies with patriarchal family structures, high fertility is reinforced when the individual is looked after from cradle to grave. The regional demography's imperviousness to socioeconomic and cultural changes has been a wide phenomenon with the exceptions of Turkey, Lebanon and Tunisia. Elsewhere, fertility decline is linked to the emergence from a rent economy. Morocco was the harbinger of this demographic change. It is not so long ago that phosphate resources were still the powerhouse in an economy that was far from suffering from scarce resources. The 1966 national family planning program failed at the first post. Marital fertility - the program's primary target - rose rather than fell. Between 1962 and 1973, marriage age _ which did not decline sufficiently - produced a rise in TFR from 7.2 to 7.4. Moroccans thus made clear their preference for large families and their lack of interest in contraception. Mineral wealth revenues redistributed by the State consolidated this social preferences for large families. And the threefold rise in phosphate prices made it possible to fund infrastructure and amenities with significant multiplier effects. The onset of fertility transition in 1975 marked a political and economic turning point. The State lost one of its key sources of non-tax revenues: phosphate. Half the value was wiped off prices in a few months, at a time when the war in the Sahara was making huge demands on spending. The fertility rate plunged in four years from 7.4 in 1973 to 5.9 in 1977. The State had to turn to the individual: taxes and the tax load rose more than 50 percent between 1972 and 1975, with the burden of phosphate-funded State spending shifting to household resources. Morocco encouraged female participation in the economy, and a new pace of life affected marriage and reproduction decisions. The opportunity cost of a birth became a factor in family strategies even amongst illiterate groups.. Morocco wasa case apart. Leaving aside Turkey and the two small countries - Lebanon and Tunisia - with an early transition onset, more than a decade separates Morocco from the remainder of regional countries. But within the space of a few years, the region fell in line with the path beaten by Morocco in the previous decade. Then, in their turn, Syria, followed by Egypt, Jordan and Iraq, Iran and all the oil-rich countries of the Arab peninsula, along with Libya, and the peripheral countries (Mauritania, Sudan) experienced marital and general fertility decline. Astonishingly, 14 out of 19 countries underwent a concerted change in fertility behavior more as if guided and orchestrated by an "invisible hand" than due to the endogenous conditions of such a heterogeneous mix of countries. The collapse in natural resource revenues is an obvious factor. In per capita export terms, oil revenues were halved between 1980 and 1985 in the least-worst cases plunging by 75 percent in Kuwait and 87 percent in Saudi Arabia, the most prosperous and influential country, and the largest country of immigration from job-seekers of the region. The demographic effect of the economic downturn was decisive. In Saudi Arabia (and in the small emirates as well), fertility behavior adapted to changing oil prices: the average Saudi family had "only" 6.5 children in 1986 compared to 8.3 ten years before. Likewise in the more populated Iraq, the fertility rate fell in the space of a few years from over 7 children to just 5.2 by 1989. Paradoxically, these prosperous countries were no longer immune from poverty-led transition. But the crisis spilled over outside the oil-producing states. Syrian fertility had attained world record levels sometimes in excess of 8 children, and crude birth rates above 50 per thousand. Age at first marriage has been rising since 1986, from 20 years in the 1970s and 1980s to 24 at the start of the present decade, when 4 in 10 women were practicing birth control. Now, despite the silence of the State, which had followed a pro-natalist policy largely for political considerations and the Middle East conflicts, Syrians have been limiting their fertility in a process which, since 1986, has affected rural as much as urban society, illiterate and educated groups alike, outward-looking regions like Damascus and Lattakiah as well as bastions of traditionalism like Aleppo. This has been a spontaneous reaction by the populace to the rigors of the recession. Between the beginning and end of the 1980s, women's participation rate doubled as dwindling resources and an increasing tax burden forced them out of the home. As mentioned earlier, the Egyptian transition is a case apart. The decline which began in 1989 was determined by the same factors - falling revenues from the decline in Sinai oil prices, a fall in income from Suez Canal navigation dues, and especially from dwindling remittances from emigrants in the Gulf - which had become the main source of balance-of-payments earnings. Per capita GDP, which had risen to Asian levels of 7-8 percent, fell to below 3 percent in 1989, with a resulting rise in the tax load. Women's participation - a luxury during Egypt's boom years - again became a necessity: women accounted for 14 percent of the labor force in 1986, and 23 percent in 1991. This pioneer country of the Arab world was one of the last to engage its transition through the inevitable circuitous route of emergence from a rent economy. Forecasts based on the paradigm of the population effects of modernization had put Egypt far ahead of Morocco in the rush towards transition. That - with a 14-year lag - was precisely the reverse of what happened. But the economy does not hold all the answers. Differential receptiveness to Western culture in the broad sense among the different constituents of the region may hold the key to behavior differentials. Here we concentrate on the Arab world. Origins, geography and colonial and post-colonial history have fashioned a distinctively Maghrebin attitude to fertility. It is not possible to demonstrate statistically how 130 years of shared history between Europe and Algeria, 75 years with Tunisia and 44 years with Morocco, not to mention the half-century of close post-independence interactions have shaped behaviors: Maghrebin women marry later and have fewer children than their Mashreq sisters, whereas on all the evidence, the converse should have been true. The quantified socioeconomic indicators are more in favor of the Mashreq countries than the lower fertility Maghreb states. The gap which emerged in the mid-1970s between the Maghreb and the Mashreq is widening. If membership of the Maghreb is a factor of delayed nuptiality and reduced fertility, that may be because the Western imprint is stronger there than in the Middle East. Foreign newspapers are on sale in the Maghreb earlier than elsewhere in the Middle East. European television channels are often more popular than the national stations. But this blanket exposure to the media and its demographic messages would affect only an affluent urban minority, and the explanation does not really hold water for the predominantly rural majority of the population among whom fertility is declining more sharply than in the Mashreq. Is education the key to this more controlled fertility? Education, both private and public, in the Maghreb has made certain accommodations on the use of language. Despite the Arabization policies pursued by Maghrebin governments, the use of French is spreading. Handbooks in French can convey a different outlook to those written in Arabic, despite the presumed identical content. However, if this explanation held entirely true, similar processes would also be observed in countries where a foreign language is equally influential, like western Africa. But despite high enrollment ratios - in French education - West African fertility shows little decline. Education in a foreign language as a vehicle for modernization is therefore not the unique determinant of atypical fertility decline in the Maghreb. The Maghreb situation can be attributed to the media and foreign language education, but even more so to its diaspora in Europe. It has become, willingly or unwillingly, the vector of two cultures. Demographic patterns in particular are imbued with exogenously acquired values. In the 1960s, the migrant family model was intrinsically pro-natalist. A generation on, a society shaped by immigration has moved away from its founding values. But the difference between the two shores of the Mediterranean does not imply total dislocation: proximity, low travel and communication costs, the impulsion to return to family and friends - all stimulated exchange networks. Europe as the favored destination for Maghrebin emigrants is a crucial factor in engendering an inflow of malthusian norms. Is fertility political? The interrelation between demography and politics is intrinsically linked to its societal specificities: Algeria illustrates how politics and ideology influenced fertility. At the 1974 Bucharest Conference, it proclaimed that "development is the best contraceptive", and introduced no official family planning program until 1983. Pro-natalist view prevailed. In the immediate aftermath of the Algerian war of independence in 1962, Algeria's potential wealth lay more in its reserves of natural gas than its reserves of human resources. President Boumedienne (1965-1978) set himself to forging a new African dragon which could feed 50 million people. Algerian nationalism struck a responsive chord with a population heavily depleted by the Algerian war despite all the factors militating in favor of fertility decline. The development strategy of "industrializing industries" favored a population rise; creating the right conditions for an expanded market and economies of scale. Early marriages and all-but-illegal contraception were instrumental in giving Algeria a permanent population lead over Morocco. Syrian populationism is a persistent after-image of the geopolitical and demographic changes which reshaped the Near East (anSyria) between World War One and the wars with Israel (1948-1982). The weakest protagonist will use population size as a tool. Both the people and leaders of Syria resented its progressive reduction leading to an anti-restrictionist credo: "encourage large families and combat the new Western trend to deliberate birth control... There is no support for Malthus here". It was a consensus in which the nationalism of governments was reconciled with the pro-natalism of the governed. At the end of the 1970s, the ideal family size was 6.1 (surviving) children; 25 percent of people desired more than 8. Still today the ideal desired family size of 5.0 children (1993) exceeds effective fertility Palestine and the Israeli Arabs are archetypal instances of the link between nationalism, conflict and fertility. Fertility which was already high in 1987 despite exceptionally high literacy, enrollment ratios and urbanization, continued to rise while plunging everywhere else in the region. The emotional resonance of the Intifada in 1987 was such as to push the TFR from 7 children in 1988 to 7.57 in 1990 (8.76 in Gaza). In Israel, on the other side of the "green line", the Israeli Arab birth rate rose 4 points to 38 per thousand in 1995, giving this minority group (16 percent) a natural growth 3 times higher than that of the Jewish majority. By a mirror effect, the way in which the Israelis have tackled the issue is illuminating. Conflicts and nationalism led to high fertility among Jews - less high than Palestinian levels, admittedly, but still higher than the norm: 2.56 for all Jews, 3.2 for the Sephardic Jews, 2.20 for the Ashkenazi Jews, 2.66 for Israeli-born Jews (1995). The average family size of most Jews, with standards of living and culture virtually on a level with those of less fertile Europeans, is three rather than two children as in the West. It is a form of insurance against the risk of losing a child to the war. Both the religious and secular versions of Zionism also favor a politically-inspired excess fertility. Fertility in Yemen remained uniformly stable and high despite the modernization introduced since Egyptian influence, rising living standards, higher child survival and enrollment ratios, and rapid urban growth. Yemen is at loggerheads with its neighbor and rival Saudi Arabia, which it accuses of having annexed Yemenite territories, with ownership disputes over the border oilfields, and attempts to undermine national unity. The former North Yemen, which resents its encirclement is insuring itself against risks both by its large population size and its unequaled fertility. Conclusion It may not always profess so openly, but the Arab State has accepted the need for population restriction. The State has become the fount of legislation, a powerful economic player, the sole decision-maker in security, education, health, and is tightening its grip on society. Providing education, health care, water, electricity, means keeping the numbers of those to whom they are delivered under control. The State achieves this dual objective through the ever-expanding capacities of its local and national bureaucracies, and their overt or diffuse pressures. Its bureaucratic structures have replaced those of traditional societies. Because it is in the nature of the State to arrogate space and power, it may enter into conflict with traditional forces, not least the extended family. Paradoxically, it is profiting from the growing homogenization of attitudes; westernized lifestyles, may be the best available contraceptive. Youssef Courbage is Research Director at the Institut National d'Etudes Demographiques in Paris. Dr. Courbage has research interests in demography, economics, sociology and city planning. He was born in Aleppo, Syria.
