Three Essays on Schooling and Health in Indonesia. Assessing the Effects of Family Planning on Fertility and of Supply-Side Education Programmes on BMI, Schooling Attainment, and Wages

Lower fertility has several benefits at the individual level: fewer births are associated with better health and schooling outcomes for women and their children, with higher household income and wealth, and with improved labour market opportunities for women. Indonesia established a national family planning programme in 1969 and total fertility has declined rapidly since but there is little consensus over the relative contribution of family planning to the observed decline. This chapter empirically examines the effectiveness of family planning in reducing total fertility at the individual level in Indonesia and the findings strongly suggest that family planning contributed to the fertility decline. The causal effect of infant mortality on total fertility is also assessed using a public water supply and sanitation programme implemented in staggered fashion across districts combined with the timing of births to capture exogenous variation in infant mortality. The results strongly indicate that increases in the number of infant deaths cause higher total fertility. This chapter also assesses the causal effect of women’s schooling on fertility using the schooling of fathers of the women who give birth as an instrument and finds that more schooling causes lower total fertility. Overall, this chapter shows that family planning contributes to lower fertility together with reductions in infant deaths and improvements in women’s schooling, and that the effects of family planning and decreases in infant mortality on fertility are larger than that of women’s schooling, which has implications for public policy aimed at reducing fertility.