Home

>

Education and Fertility: Panel Time-Series Evidence from Southern Africa

In this paper I investigate whether secondary school enrollment has played any role on total fertility rates in all …fifteen countries of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) between 1980 and 2009. The evidence, based on panel time-series analysis (I make use of the Pooled OLS, Fixed Effects, Common Correlated Effects and Fixed Effects with Instrumental Variables estimators), robustly suggest that education has reduced fertility rates in the community, or that the community is already trading-o¤ quantity for quality of children. The results are important because lower fertility, caused by education, implies more capital per worker, higher productivity and therefore higher growth rates, and also because in accordance to the unied growth theory— they suggest that southern Africa is experiencing its own transition from the Malthusian regime into sustained modern growth.

Working paper 431
1 May 2014
SHARE THIS Working Paper PUBLICATION:
22 May 2014
Publication Type: Working Paper
JEL Code: I20, J13, O55

Related South Africa’s Cities and Growth Spatial Challenges and Policy Interventions Content

Request for Proposals: The role of cities as drivers of growth and employment
Background Urbanization in South Africa is expected to reach 80% by...
Call for Work
South Africa’s future will be decided in our cities
Discussion Document 14 South Africa’s cities face multiple, overlap...
Dieter von Fintel, Justin Visagie, Ivan Turok, Takwanisa Machemedze, Claus Rabe, Sebastian Galiani, Edward Glaeser
Discussion Document
Monitoring South Africa’s metropolitan economies: A survey of the data landscape
Discussion Document 13 Disparities in data across different metropo...
Dieter von Fintel
Discussion Document
Cities, productivity and Jobs in SA: Problems and potential
Discussion Document 12 Cities contribute to national prosperity bec...
Ivan Turok, Justin Visagie
Discussion Document
Place-based economic policies: international lessons for South Africa
Discussion Document 11 Place-based policies are designed to support...
Harris Selod, Claus Rabe
Discussion Document
What luminosity data can and cannot reveal about South Africa’s urban economies
Discussion Document 10 As novel types of data are becoming availabl...
Takwanisa Machemedze
Discussion Document
Crime: A policy-oriented survey
Discussion Document 9 South Africa has a reputation for having high...
Sebastian Galiani
Discussion Document
Virtual CDE Workshop on SA Cities and Growth
Urban economics has provided powerful insights into how the charact...
Workshop