Trend and Effect of National Income, Gross Domestic Product, Income Inequality and Education Expenditure on Adolescent Fertility of South Asia

Abstract

This study attempts to assess the trend and effect of national income, income inequality, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, and government expenditure on education on adolescent fertility rate (AFR) of South Asian countries. The data for this study is extracted from the World Bank open database. K-nearest neighbor (KNN) imputation method is used to estimate the missing values in the datasets. Simple linear regression and multiple linear regression are used to examine the associations of dependent and various independent variables. It is observed from the study that both the unadjusted and adjusted models, both GDP per capita and national income have found significant negative impact on the AFR of South Asia. Income inequality is also found to have a significant negative impact on the AFR after adjusting for other factors. So, this study suggested overall economic growth of the country will have a positive and steady impact on AFR of South Asia.