Population Homeostasis in Sub-Saharan Africa

David de la Croix and Paula Gobbi

No 2021026, LIDAM Discussion Papers IRES from Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES)

Abstract: Global population growth remains one of the major challenges of the twenty-first century. This is particularly true for African countries which have been undergoing their demographic transitions. To investigate whether predicted increasing population density and urbanization can help to stabilize African population, we construct a database for 84 georeferenced Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) samples including 947,191 individuals in sub-Saharan Africa and match each location with gridded population density from NASA. We apply a proportional hazard model to evaluate the quantitative impact of local population density on the transitions from childlessness to motherhood, and from celibacy to marriage. Moving from the 5th to the 95th percentile of population density increases the median age at first birth by 2.2 years. This roughly decreases completed fertility by half a child. The same increase in population density increases the median age at first marriage by 3.3 years. These findings contribute to the understanding of why fertility has not dropped in Africa as fast as expected. One part of the answer is that population density remains low. Yet the total effect of increased density on fertility remains limited and counting on it to stabilize the population would be unrealistic.

Keywords: Fertility; Homeostasis; Africa; Population density (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-11-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-dev and nep-gro
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://sites.uclouvain.be/econ/DP/IRES/2021026.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Population homeostasis in sub-Saharan Africa (2022)
Working Paper: Population Homeostasis in Sub-Saharan Africa (2021)
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:ctl:louvir:2021026

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LIDAM Discussion Papers IRES from Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES) Place Montesquieu 3, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Virginie LEBLANC ().