Environmental degradation and the demand for children: searching for the vicious circle in Pakistan

Environment and Development Economics, 2002, vol. 7, issue 01, pages 123-146

Abstract: If children contribute to the household by using their time to collect natural resources from common property sources such as collecting firewood, fetching water, collecting fodder, grazing animals then local depletion of these resources could potentially increase the demand for children. This feedback could create a dynamically unstable vicious circle between population growth and resource depletion. We empirically examine several elements of such a vicious circle hypothesis using data from Pakistan with unusually rich detail on both child time use and firewood collection activities. We find that collection activities do absorb a substantial part of household resources; that children s tasks are relatively devoted to collection activities; that child time is a significant, but not a dominant, portion of collection activities; and the presence of older children in the household reduces the time that women devote to household tasks. Exploratory multivariate regressions show a partial correlation between indicators of firewood scarcity and fertility a relationship that varies across regions of Pakistan.

Date: 2002

Downloads: (external link)
http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1355770X02000074 link to article abstract page (text/html)

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

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Development Economics from Cambridge University Press
Address: The Edinburgh Building, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 2RU UK
Series data maintained by Mike Eden ().