Is education the best contraceptive? Using the multistate human capital projection model, our analysis shows that the projected changes in India population vary depending on investments in education and helping women reduce unwanted fertility rates, that investments in both education and helping women in each education category—but particularly less educated women—meet their wanted fertility will have the largest impacts on India’s population projections, and that the impact from investment in reducing unwanted fertility will be much more immediate and significant than only investments in education. Our analysis also reveals that an increasing education transition rate in India will not only help to achieve a population age structure that is favorable for economic growth, but also result in a larger share of skilled labor force that help to achieve higher economic growth rate. More importantly, investment in girls’ education and achieving gender equality in education will be the most effective measure to increase India’s population education level and improve its overall values of human capital. 1. Introduction Education confers a range of benefits to individuals and societies. Hannum and Buchman [1, Page 20] find that “countries with better-educated citizens tend to have healthier population, as educated individuals make more informed health choices, live longer, and have healthier children. In addition, the populations of countries with more educated citizens tend to grow more slowly, as educated people are able to lower their fertility.” Cohen et al. [2] and Rehani [3] also cite a range of benefits of secondary education in the developing world, including lowering fertility and population growth. Education affects a range of factors associated with the socioeconomic development of women, including fertility, health, and economic achievement [4, 5]. Female education, particularly completion of primary school and into secondary school, has emerged as strongly related to lowered fertility [6–12]. In a study of the spread of primary schooling in sub-Saharan Africa, Lloyd et al. [13, Page 510] used contraceptive practice as a marker of the fertility transition and found that “all countries that have achieved mass schooling also show evidence of having entered the fertility transition.” Only two countries in their study started the transition prior to mass education. While variations have been found, for example, by Cochrane [14], that small amounts of education can result in higher levels of fertility, leading to an inverted U shape relationship, and that
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