Socio-Economic Determinants of Fertility

Abstract

Abstract The fertility levels of developing countries correlate with many socio-economic variables including girls’ or women’s education, infant and child mortality, GDP/capita, and percent urban. To determine whether these correlations are causal or simply due to collinearity we rely on multivariate fixed effect regression analyses. The results identify women’s education as the most important determinant of fertility, which is consistent with past studies. Next, we examine the relationship between education and fertility over the course of transitions from 1960 and 2015 in individual developing countries. Instead of finding continuous relationships during the transitions, several puzzling anomalies appear. In the pre-transition phase, fertility is unresponsive to rising education resulting in delays in the onset of transition. Once a few countries in a region enter the transition, other countries follow sooner than expected and over time the onset of the transition occurs at ever lower levels of education. Moreover, once a transition is underway, fertility in many countries declines more rapidly than can plausibly be expected from rising education levels alone. To explain these anomalies, we rely on several concepts that have been neglected in conventional demographic theories: diffusion processes, social norms, and family planning programs.

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