Religions, Fertility, and Growth in South-East Asia

David de la Croix and Clara Delavallade

No 12622, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: We investigate the extent to which religions' pronatalism is detrimental to growth via the fertility/education channel. Using censuses from South-East Asia, we first estimate an empirical model of fertility and show that having a religious affiliation significantly raises fertility, especially for couples with intermediate to high education levels. We next use these estimates to identify the parameters of a structural model of fertility choice. On average, Catholicism is the most pro-child religion (increasing total spending on children), followed by Buddhism, while Islam has a strong pro-birth component (redirecting spending from quality to quantity). We show that pro-child religions depress growth in the early stages of growth by lowering savings, physical capital, and labor supply. These effects account for 10% to 30% of the actual growth gaps between countries over 1950-1980. At later stages of growth, pro-birth religions lower human capital accumulation, explaining between 10% to 20% of the growth gap between Muslim and Buddhist countries over 1980-2010.

Keywords: Quality-quantity tradeoff; Catholicism; Buddhism; Islam; indirect inference; Education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 O11 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gro and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP12622 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: RELIGIONS, FERTILITY, AND GROWTH IN SOUTHEAST ASIA (2018)
Working Paper: Religions, Fertility, and Growth in South-East Asia (2016)
Working Paper: Religions, Fertility and Growth in South-East Asia (2015)
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:cpr:ceprdp:12622

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP12622

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().