Economic Theories Of Fertility Research Articles

Two Aspects of Fertility Behavior in South Africa

In this article we analyze two aspects of female fertility using unit record data from South Africa. We examine the effect of individual, household, and community characteristics on the age at first conception and the number of pregnancies for a national sample of women. The segmented nature of theeconomy of South Africa allows us to study differences in fertility patterns among the different socioeconomic classes and across the different races. 1 While much has been said about fertility behavior of women in sub-Saharan Africa, an analysis of the fertility patterns of South African women is significantly absent. 2 In this article we attempt to fill this gap in the literature. The first aspect of fertility behavior that we examine is the age at first conception. In addition to the significant biological components associated with the age at first conception there are economic and nonbiological factors that affect the probability of conceiving by influencing the choices that women make (including choices regarding birth control and other family-planning strategies). Age at first conception is modeled using a hazard model. Of particular importance is the effect of the highest level of education attained on the age at first conception. The estimation results show that the more educated a woman is, the higher is the age at first conception subject to a threshold level of education. There are no significant racial differences in the age at first conception. The second aspect of fertility examined is the number of times a woman has been pregnant. Economic theories of fertility assumethatparentsoptimally choose the number of children they want to have, taking into account the costs and benefits associated with a given number of births, including the costs of avoiding unwanted births. Assuming that no pregnancy is unwanted, the number of times a woman is pregnant over her reproductive age can

POPULATION ECONOMICS: A SURVEY OF RECENT RESEARCH

The modern revival of economic research in the field of population which has occurred over the past 25 years represents a return to a traditional area of inquiry in political economy. The Malthusian theory of population established a framework for the economic analysis of population and demographic phenomena. However economic analysis of population questions declined and became increasingly preoccupied with a narrow range of problems namely the economic consequences of demographic change for well over 5 decades following the ascendancy of neoclassical economics. The focus began to shift in the late 1950s with the outline of microeconomic frameworks for the analysis of fertility. These paradigms explicitly acknowledged the costs benefits quality and quantity of children and the socioeconomic factors which determine the demand for children. These frameworks signalled a move away from the focus on economic aspects of fertility to that of the economics of the family and household. Another important and influential trend addressed the causes of population changes and focused on long term secular changes for which sociological as well as economic theories of fertility were developed. The extension of modern economic analysis to the study of demographic phenomena is mainly due to the work of GS Becker. His recent book A Treatise on the Family (1981) is reviewed in this article along with 4 other recent works: RA Easterlin (1980); J. Simon and P. Lindert (1981); J. Simon (1981); and D. Eversley and W. Kollmann (1982). The major contributions and limitations of each are critically discussed and their influence on theory and research in population economics and demography is assessed.

Economic Decision Theory and Human Fertility Behavior: A Speculative Essay

Almost all explanations of human fertility have some decision making concepts at their base. This is necessary if choice is in some way involved in fertility determination and if nondecisions are viewed as decisions i.e. as a type of passive choice making. All of this is particularly clear in economic theories of human fertility. Maximization is the explicit decision making criterion and forms the central element of such theories. In this speculative essay attention is directed to some implications of maximization as a decision rule and to the possibility and possible value of introducing alternative decision schemes. In the alternative maximization is not denied yet it is not assumed to be universal. Outlines of different decision theory are presented. The general approach taken is a process view of decision making. Different decision making processes may or may not be consistent with maximization. As this approach can yield very different views of the fertility decision process it allows different questions to be asked about decision making. Economic theory assumes rationality yet fails to clarify the way decisions are made. All economic theories of fertility have a certain common basis; they are all substantively rationalistic. The theories differ on the variables that are considered but they are similar in their implicit view of how decisions are made. Maximization theories are usually of a micro nature yet the tests for the most part involve macro results. The theory concerns how a specific family would behave under specific circumstances. The test involves looking at statistics about how a population behaves on the average apart from the behavior of specific families that determine the average. The question that arises is whether there is any gain by using a decision procedure involving a nonmaximization or occasional maximization approach. Decision making whether of the maximizing or nonmaximizing kind may involve many procedural steps. The number of procedures would depend on the specific content of the decision problem. It is not possible to simply shift from a substantive theory to a detailed procedural theory but an attempt can be made to develop a theory based on a few procedural classes. Each class would be abstract. It would not indicate the detailed procedures used but would suggest the various ways in which decisions are actually made. A brief statement of a theory of the decision process is included and the advantages of models that contain routine decision making are reviewed.

Fertility decline: transition or transformation?

This essay argues on the basis of evidence from Northern Rwanda that economic theories of fertility which fail to take into account the value of children for reproducing a community's social relations are of limited value in traditional noncapitalist or peasant societies. Regarding the transition to low fertility as an adjustment of the population to available resources ignores the fact that many families in the developing world regard their children as absolute values, not values relative to other resources, and therefore the transition to lower fertility is a dramatic change rather than an adjustment. The Kiga of Rwanda have in the last 20 years or so become differentiated into a group of richer households with excess land and a labor shortage and poorer households with excess labor and a land shortage. In the face of severe material shortages, the poorer families continue to desire and have almost as many children as the richer. Among women aged 25-35, the poorer group had on average 5.5 children while the wealthier had 3.9 on average. Kiga families are embedded in larger social units which provide social insurance against misfortune, and having many children thus reconstitutes a social value which minimizes the impact of misfortune. High fertility appears to occur in social economies where there is no reasonable motivation for reducing family size; where high value is placed on the survival of the collectivity and on the reproduction of concrete social relations, the only rational behavior is to have many children.

Estimating the cost of children and some results from urban United States

The testing of economic theories of fertility has been hampered by the absence of suitable data on the direct (versus opportunity) costs of children. This study hopes to help remedy this deficiency, first, by proposing a new method of estimating the magnitude of money expenditures parents make on their children. This method is then applied to the urban sample of the 1960–1961 U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey to estimate the total money expenditure costs of children to age eighteen. The distribution of these costs by income level, by birth order, by age of the child, and by components of cost (food, housing, clothing, and so on) is considered. The impact of the number and age of children on family living standards is also explored.