Fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa: the Role of Inheritance

Sébastien Fontenay, Paula Eugenia Gobbi and Marc Goñi

No 2025-06, Working Papers ECARES from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles

Abstract: Fertility in sub-Saharan Africa is the highest in the world. We showcase a driver of this exceptionally high fertility which has been largely overlooked by demographers and economists: inheritance customs. We develop a theory of inheritance under subsistence agriculture, where households face economic incentives to limit fertility to avoid dividing land into inefficiently small parcels. Consequently, fertility is higher where inheritance is transmitted to a single heir (impartible) than where it is divided equally among all children (partible). We test this prediction by linking deep-rooted inheritance customs for more than 800 ethnic groups with modern demographic surveys covering 24 countries. Exploiting ancestral borders in a spatial Regression Discontinuity Design, we show that belonging to an ethnic group with impartible inheritance increases fertility by around one child per woman and that fertility differences are larger in lands subject to indivisibilities than in lands suited for cultivating labor-intensive crops.

Keywords: Fertility; Inheritance; Sub-Saharan Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 75 p.
Date: 2025-05
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