Impact of Women Empowerment on Fertility Preferences in Pakistan

Reproduction is an important aspect of a women's life, unfortunately in Pakistan fertility rates are quite high in comparison to other developing countries as well as in comparison to the other South Asian countries. Different studies have suggested that women empowerment can help reduce fertility rates. The present study has attempted to analyze the role of women empowerment along with other socioeconomic indicators on three different dimensions of the fertility behavior i.e. Number of children born (current fertility status), ideal number of children and birth intervals (future fertility status. Data of Demographic and Health Survey (PDHS) 2012-13 has been used. The analysis consists of two levels, at level one a descriptive analysis is carried out. As three different aspects of fertility are the count data. Therefore at the next stage models will be estimated by using poison regression technique and Incidence Rate Ratios (IRR) are reported. It has been found that women’s being empowered in financial matters, seeking health care and in household decision making are helpful in reducing fertility. Furthermore, participation in job by women, living in urban areas, having secondary or higher education, access to awareness created by the media, married at higher age are also significant factors in reducing fertility. However, women facing incidence of miscarriage or death of a child tends to increase the fertility. Study had found that wealth of the household, education of husband and having sons have very limited role on the fertility behavior.

Noether Symmetries, Corresponding Conservation Laws and Applications

This thesis is based on a geometrical/physical analysis of the conserved quantities/forms related to each Noether symmetry of the geodetic Lagrangian of plane symmetric and spherically symmetric spacetimes. We present a complete list of such metrics along with their Noether symmetries of the geodetic Lagrangian. The conserved quantities corresponding to each Noether symmetry are obtained. Thereafter, a detailed discussion of the geometrical and physical interpretation of these quantities is given. Additionally, the structure constants of the associated Lie algebras are obtained for each case. Furthermore, we find the Ricci tensors to see which metrics are gravitational wave solutions and the scalar curvatures are obtained in each case to analyze the essential singularities. The stress-energy tensors and their traces are obtained in each case as these are the sources of spacetime curvature. The last part of this thesis is to use the symmetries to obtain the invariant solutions whenever possible. The problem of constructing the optimal system has been be used to classify invariant solutions. We intend to find the one-dimensional optimal systems of the Lie subalgebras for the system of geodesic equations by using Noether symmetries. Further, we find the invariants corresponding to each element of the optimal system. These invariants enable one to reduce the system of geodesic equations (nonlinear system of 2nd order ordinary differential equations (ODEs)) to a system of first order ODEs. The resulting systems are solved via known methods (e.g., separation of variables, integrating factor etc). In some cases, we are able to get exact solutions of the system of geodesic equations.