Razi Journal of Medical Sciences

Background: Previous research reviews show that most of people think fertility decreases because of economic pressures and after solving economic problems it increases again. This study trys to investigate economic factors effecting on fertility rate in Iran during time and highlight the most important economic factor with panel data approach.

Methods: This is a retrospective descriptive-analytic study. For doing this economic descriptive analysis, combination of data from cross sectional and time series is used for all Iran provinces during 1966-2013. Data were gathered from Iran Statistics Centre. Fertility rate was regressed on unemployment and women employment rate, GDP per capita and family total expenditures as economic factors. The final estimations were done via Eviews.7 and STATA.12.

Results: Unemployment and women employment rate, and family total expenditures had negative effect and GDP per capita had a positive effect on fertility rate. Between the research variables, family total expenditures had the smallest effect and women employment the largest. Significant coefficients were assessed at the 95% confidence level.

Conclusion: Opposite of public attitudes, the effect of family expenditures on fertility rate is very small toward other factors. Knowing GDP per capita of Iran provinces it will be clear that specific economic factors have small importance toward multidimensional factors like women employment or unemployment factors.