Asia-Pacific Population Journal - Volume 12, Issue 1, 1997

Policies that accept the wider mobility of the population are likely to accord with policies that will enhance the wellbeing of greater numbers of people.

Policy measures, in their dimensions, urgency and intensity, should differ between Bangladesh’s metrocities.

After substantial efforts by population and family planning programmes, fertility in Nepal has begun to decline.

When a data set is generated from a country-wide survey, it is important to test it to determine whether or not fertility variations are due to the structure of the data. Generally, small area data are more or less homogeneous in nature. This observation is supported by Garner and Diamond (1988) who pointed out that individuals who share similar characteristics related to fertility behaviour, such as living in the same geographical area, are likely to act in a similar fashion. There may be fertility variations between small areas in Bangladesh, but these have been generally ignored in previous studies (see, for example, Islam and Khan, 1991, 1995; Khan and Raeside, 1994; Amin and others, 1995).