Bargaining over Fertility in Rural Ethiopia

Holger Seebens

No 25, Proceedings of the German Development Economics Conference, Berlin 2006 from Verein für Socialpolitik, Research Committee Development Economics

Abstract: The results of the Demographic Health Survey (DHS) reveal that women in Ethiopia prefer fewer children than men, which can be explained by the greater costs that women have to incur from pregnancy, delivery and care for children. In view of differing preferences it is yet not clear which factors determine the final decision. The aim of this study is to shed light on the impact of different bargaining weights on family planning within married couples in rural Ethiopia. Bargaining over fertility can be split into two parts: spacing between births and the number of children. Building on the intrahousehold bargaining framework I investigate both aspects. Applying multistate and count data models I test the hypothesis that women?s bargaining power is negatively related to the number of children and positively to the period length between adjacent births using a detailed data set from rural Ethiopia. Both hypotheses find support from the data.

Keywords: Fertility; intrahousehold bargaining; multistate model; Ethiopia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr and nep-dev
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/19850/1/Seebens.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:zbw:gdec06:4748

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Proceedings of the German Development Economics Conference, Berlin 2006 from Verein für Socialpolitik, Research Committee Development Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().