The demand side of Africa's demographic transition: desired fertility, wealth, and jobs

Celine Zipfel

STICERD - Economic Organisation and Public Policy Discussion Papers Series from Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE

Abstract: Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) accounts for around 40% of projected global births over the next 80 years. To investigate the roots of persistently high fertility rates across the region, I assemble micro data from 192 Demographic and Health Surveys covering 66 low-and-middle-income countries and document three key facts. First, women's fertility ideals and intentions are, on average, substantially higher in SSA than other low-and-middle-income regions. This gap is particularly large among poorer households: the socioeconomic gradient in desired fertility is twice as steep (more negative) on the sub-continent. Second, poorer women are also significantly less likely to work for a wage in SSA, where there exists a robust negative relationship between female wage work prevalence and desired fertility across provinces. Third, exploiting within-SSA variation across 25 countries, I find that increases in female salaried employment opportunities at the province level are associated with a flattening of this gradient over time, conditional on a rich set of covariates. These findings provide suggestive evidence that the nature of SSA's occupational change process may be an important contributor to the region's distinct fertility transition.

Date: 2022-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-dev and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/eopp/eopp71.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:stieop:71

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in STICERD - Economic Organisation and Public Policy Discussion Papers Series from Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().