Family Planning and Development: Aggregate Effects of Contraceptive Use

Tiago Cavalcanti, Georgi Kocharkov and Cezar Santos

The Economic Journal, 2021, vol. 131, issue 634, 624-657

Abstract: What is the role of family planning interventions on fertility, savings, human capital investment and development? To examine this, endogenous unwanted fertility is embedded in an otherwise standard quantity–quality overlapping generations model of fertility and growth. The model features costly fertility control and families can (partially) insure against a fertility risk by using costly modern contraceptives. In the event of unexpected pregnancies, households can also opt to abort some pregnancies, at a cost. Given the number of children born, parents decide how much education to provide and how much to save out of their income. We fit the model to Kenyan data, implement several family planning policies and decompose their aggregate effects. Our results suggest that with a small government budget (say, up to 0.5% of GDP), family planning interventions might be more cost-effective in improving long-run living standards than policies that subsidise basic education.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ej/ueaa070 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Family Planning and Development: Aggregate Effects of Contraceptive Use (2020)
Working Paper: Family Planning and Development: Aggregate Effects of Contraceptive Use (2018)
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:oup:econjl:v:131:y:2021:i:634:p:624-657.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Economic Journal is currently edited by Francesco Lippi

More articles in The Economic Journal from Royal Economic Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press () and ().