Journal of Data Science

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to identify the effects of socioeconomic factors and family planning program effort on total fertility rate with national level data from forty-three developing countries. The data used have mainly been taken from the secondary source “Family Planning and Child Survival: 100 Developing Countries” compiled by the Center for Population and Family Health, Columbia University. Because the independent variables were found to be highly correlated among themselves, component regression technique has been used to analyze the data. The analysis shows that the family planning program effort has the largest contribution in lowering the total fertility rate, followed by percent of urban population, female literacy rate, and infant mortality rate in that order. Policy implications are discussed.