Brazilian Soaps Reduce Fertility in Brazil

In the last decades the governmental programs to educate people in Brazil about methods contraceptives was very poor, with short budget and without priority. What puzzle scientists is that even though of inexistent help, families of all sections of Brazilian society reduced dramatically the rate of children. Today Brazil reached the same rates as european countries.

VEJA, the more important Brazilian weekly magazine, reported in its cover edition of  July 2008 “Where are the Babies?” that the fertility rate in Brazil is 1.8 (for 2.1 in United Stats). It was 6.3 in sixties.

Between 1960 and 2000, Brazil’s fertility rate plummeted from 6.3 to 2.3. The only other country with a comparable decline during that period was China, under its rigid one-child policy. But what was behind the Brazilian fertility plunge?

One major factor may have been the influence of soap operas, according to a fascinating by Eliana La Ferrara, Alberto Chong, and Suzanne Duryea, issued by the Bureau of Economic Analysis for Development. Brazil’s most popular prime-time soaps have for years revolved around small and stable middle-class families that were much smaller than the traditional Brazilian family. The study found that wherever the soaps aired, the fertility for women dropped significantly, as they adapted to the reality they saw on television.

“This paper has explored the effects of television, and in particular of programs such as soap operas, on women’s fertility. Our analysis draws on the experience of Brazil, a country where soap opera watching is ubiquitous and cuts across social classes. We exploit differences in the timing of entry into different markets of Rede Globo, which until the early 1990s had an effective monopoly on novelas production in Brazil, to estimate the impact of Globo availability on 22 fertility choices. We find that, after controlling for time varying controls and for time-invariant area characteristics, the presence of the Globo signal leads to significantly lower fertility. This effect is stronger for women of low socioeconomic status, as measured by education or durable goods ownership. The effect is also stronger for women who are in the middle and late phases of their childbearing life, suggesting that television contributed more to stopping behavior than to delayed first births, consistently with demographic patterns documented for Brazil. Finally, suggestive evidence in the last part of the paper indicates that the results may be interpreted not only in terms of exposure to television, but also of exposure to the particular reality portrayed by Brazilian novelas. Our findings have important policy implications for today’s developing countries.”