Childbearing Trends in Indonesia since the 1998 Political Reform : Weighing the Roles of Economic Development and Socio-demographic Factors

Abstract: Indonesia has experienced three different political eras: ‘old order’ under the regime ofpresident Soekarno, ‘new order’ under the regime of president Soeharto; and ‘reformationera’ in which democracy has been applied until now. The changes of economic and politicalconditions from one era to another have always gone hand in hand with the development ofthe country’s population. Many social scientists argue that old order is closely associated tohigh mortality and high fertility rate following the regime’s economic failure. On thecontrary, together with socio-economic improvement, family planning program, as one of theproduct of Soeharto regime, is often considered to be a great success in reducing thecountry’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR) from 5.6 in the mid 60’s to 2.4 in the late 90’s beforeanother economic crisis hit the country. As Soeharto resigned in 1998, the national socioeconomyhas been changing to a great extent. This writing weighs the role of economicdevelopment on Indonesian women childbearing behavior from 1999 to 2007 given thedemographic differences. In doing so, I analyze individual-level data which contains evermarriedwomen’s detailed life-course history of childbearing and test the parity-specificeffect of women’s economic status development on their childbearing behavior through eventhistory analysis (proportional hazard regression), given the socio-demographic differences inIndonesia. This thesis suggests that since 1999, the role of socio-economic developmentposes a stronger effect than cultural and religious differences in determining the trend ofwomen’s childbearing behavior. Especially education has very strong positive effect tochildbearing.