Multilevel Factors Influencing Fertility on the Agricultural Frontier: A Longitudinal Analysis of Women in the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon

William Pan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
David Carr, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Very limited research exists that link factors influencing fertility on the agricultural frontier, which is peculiar given the topic's implications for human development, environmental conservation, and the extraordinarily high fertility typical of frontier environments, usually much higher fertility than their cohorts in migration origin areas. This research extends Carr and Pan (2002) to test contextual factors influencing fertility in the rural agricultural frontier of the Ecuadorian Amazon. We utilize longitudinal geo-referenced data from a representative sample of household farm plots in 1990 and 1999, and linked to community data collected in 2000. Multilevel models are used to test the contextual effects influencing fertility at the level of the community and region (e.g., road and electrical networks, road quality, health care availability, quality, and utilization), household (e.g. changes in land size, tenure status, land use), and characteristics of the woman (e.g., age, education, parity).