Shifts in Determinants of Fertility among Women Living in the Amazon

William Pan, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Daesha Ramachandran, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
David Carr, University of California, Santa Barbara

A fundamental relationship in studies of tropical land use is the contribution of population growth to agricultural development and expansion. Population-environment interactions often view population in aggregate form – i.e., the influence of total and/or age- /gender-specific population to land use trajectories. We offer two contributions to this literature: (1) an in-depth analysis of spatio-temporal dependent factors influencing fertility in a forest frontier and (2) modeling the importance of population components (fertility and migration) on land use change. Data are derived from longitudinal household surveys in Ecuador’s northern Amazon, where petroleum extraction has accelerated migration to the region since the 1960s and 20-year birth histories are re-constructed for each woman of childbearing age from 1980 to 1999. Multilevel models are implemented to (1) identify factors causally linked to childbirth and (2) model the impact of five-year fertility and migration rates from 1980-1999 on land use changes observed from 1990 to 1999.