Age of Marriage and Fertility: A Policy Review

The average age at which women marry and the number of children they produce tend to be negatively correlated. This negative relationship has received a good deal of attention from social scientists over the past several decades, and it has on occasion been suggested that if governments could find a way to raise the average age of marriage, the result would be a significant reduction in completed fertility.1 Since reduction of population growth rates is an explicit policy of many developing nations, particularly Pakistan, it seems worth taking a closer look at age of marriage as a policy tool.