Climate Heat Exposure and Fertility Decline in 30 Asian Countries, 1990–2021

This dataset supports the manuscript titled “Climate Heat Exposure and Fertility Decline in Asia: Evidence from Dynamic Panel and System-GMM Estimation.” The dataset is a country-year panel covering 30 Asian and Pacific countries from 1990 to 2021. It contains 960 observations and integrates demographic, socioeconomic, climatic, migration, precipitation and natural-disaster indicators used to examine the relationship between climate heat exposure and fertility outcomes. The principal outcome variable is the birth rate. The principal explanatory variable is a climate heat index. Additional variables include child mortality, female labour-force participation, net migration, tertiary-school enrolment, unemployment, urbanization, the logarithm of gross domestic product per capita, annual precipitation and selected disaster indicators. The disaster variables include disaster type, total deaths, number injured, total affected and estimated total damage. The countries represented are Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, China, Fiji, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Laos, Malaysia, Maldives, Micronesia, Myanmar, Nepal, Oman, Pakistan, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vanuatu, Vietnam and Yemen. The dataset was assembled for dynamic panel analysis of fertility persistence and climate exposure, including fixed-effects, difference-generalized method of moments and system-generalized method of moments estimation. Some variables contain missing observations because the availability of individual indicators differs across countries and years.