Estate women’s fertility in Sri Lanka: Some aberrant perspectives in the causal links

The common findings of research are that women in the labour force bear fewer children than those out of it. However, the behavioural pattern of Indian Tamils is somewhat aberrant in nature as for some time in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, their fertility performance was lower than for those women in the other major ethnic groups in the country, namely the Sinhalese and the Sri Lankan Tamils. On closer examination of the underlying factors, it becomes evident that it is again not the labour force participation per se that was the determining factor, and that fresh and different evidence reveals factors accounting for this impressive but anomalous inverse link.