Does Women Well-being Matter for Demand and Development of Children?

Women well-being has number of socioeconomic and developmental implications. Early child development is directly linked with well-being of mothers and educated women demand lower children. However, the existing literature hardly focused this area, therefore, the current study has investigated the impact of women wellbeing on fertility and early child development. For this purpose, this study constructed women well-being index to measure the well-being of the women by using four dimensions, economic well-being of women, social well-being of women, political awareness of women and satisfaction of women in different aspects of life. Moreover, early child development index has considered as proxy for child development which covers four dimensions of early child development, literacy-numeracy of children, physical growth of children, learning of children and socio-emotional development of children. In this connection, the data was collected from thirty-six districts across the Punjab province, Pakistan. By applying descriptive and regression analysis, the study found that women well-being has positive association with all domains of early child development. However, women well-being and its dimensions have negative relationship with fertility. Therefore, improvement in well-being of women may a suitable strategy especially for developing economies to enhance early child development and to reduce demand of children.Classification-JEL: C22, E43, F39