Education and Fertility: Panel Time-Series Evidence from Southern Africa

Manoel Bittencourt ()

No 201402, Working Papers from University of Pretoria, Department of Economics

Abstract: In this paper we investigate whether secondary school enrolment has played any role on total fertility rates in all fifteen members of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) between 1980 and 2009. The evidence, based on panel time-series analysis (we make use of the Pooled OLS, Fixed Effects and Fixed Effects with Instrumental Variables estimators), robustly suggest that education has indeed reduced fertility rates in the region, or that the community is already trading-off quantity for quality of children. The results are important not only because lower fertility, caused by education, implies more capital per worker, higher productivity and therefore higher growth rates, but also because in accordance to the unified growth theory they suggest that southern Africa is experiencing its own transition from the Malthusian epoch into a sustained (modern) growth regime.

Keywords: Education; fertility; Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 J13 O55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2014-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-edu and nep-gro
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pre:wpaper:201402

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