Fertility Differences Between Migrants and Stayers in a Polygamous Context: Evidence from Senegal

Elisabeth K. Kraus () and Amparo González-Ferrer ()
Additional contact information
Elisabeth K. Kraus: Federal Institute for Population Research
Amparo González-Ferrer: Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)

Journal of International Migration and Integration, 2023, vol. 24, issue 1, No 7, 137-164

Abstract: Abstract This study takes a ‘country-of-origin’ or dissimilation perspective to compare the timing of births and completed fertility of international migrants and of those who stay at origin. In order to disentangle selection effects determining differential fertility behaviour of migrants, other mechanisms explaining migrant fertility (disruption, interrelation of events) are also examined. Furthermore, we take into consideration the prevalence of polygamy in Senegal to enhance our knowledge of migrant fertility in this specific context. For the empirical analysis, we use longitudinal data collected in the framework of the MAFE-Senegal project (Migrations between Africa and Europe), which includes retrospective life histories of non-migrants in Senegal and migrants in France, Italy and Spain. We estimate discrete time hazard models and Poisson regressions for male and female respondents separately to analyse the timing of first and higher-order births as well as completed fertility. The results show a strong disruptive effect of migration on childbearing probabilities for men and women, clearly related to the geographic separation of partners due to the out-migration of the man. Increased birth risks in the first year upon arrival could be observed for migrant women following their husbands to Europe, suggesting an interrelation of migration and fertility events. Regarding completed fertility, migrants have significantly fewer children by the age of 40 compared to their non-migrant counterparts, which among men is largely driven by a strong negative effect of polygamous migrants.

Keywords: Migration; Fertility; Polygamy; Sub-Saharan Africa; MAFE (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12134-020-00802-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
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:spr:joimai:v:24:y:2023:i:1:d:10.1007_s12134-020-00802-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer ... tudies/journal/12134

DOI: 10.1007/s12134-020-00802-0

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of International Migration and Integration is currently edited by Lori Wilkinson

More articles in Journal of International Migration and Integration from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().