Does female employment reduce fertility rates? Evidence from the Senegalese horticultural export sector

Goedele Van den Broeck and Miet Maertens

No 182715, 2014 International Congress, August 26-29, 2014, Ljubljana, Slovenia from European Association of Agricultural Economists

Abstract: The recent horticultural export boom in Senegal has created new off-farm wage employment opportunities for the rural population, especially for women. We hypothesise that female wage employment may lower fertility rates through an income effect, an empowerment effect and a substitution effect, and address this question empirically using household survey data and two different regression techniques (a Difference-in-Differences estimator and an Instrumental Variable approach). We find that besides education, female employment has a significant negative effect on fertility rates. Reducing fertility rates is considered as a prerequisite for reaching the MDGs, and our finding implies that the horticultural export boom and associated employment may indirectly contribute to this.

Keywords: Food Security and Poverty; Labor and Human Capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18
Date: 2014-08
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/182715/files/V ... s_Evidence-487_a.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ags:eaae14:182715

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.182715

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2014 International Congress, August 26-29, 2014, Ljubljana, Slovenia from European Association of Agricultural Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().