We establish the importance of government corruption and youth literacy for their effects on Youth Reproductive Health (YRH), with particularly strong effects on adolescent girls, in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). We identify the magnitude of these previously unspecified factors in the reproductive health of young people by controlling for the commonly cited influences of poverty and social inequality. We also measure the policy-mediated effects of ethnic diversity on women’s ages at marriage, the marriage age-gap, the age at first sexual encounter, and the prevalence of sexual encounters before age 15. Our analysis highlights the interplay of these factors in a region where there is high risk for sexually-transmitted diseases (STD).We account for the possible endogeneity of youth literacy when used as a predictor of YRH. Our crosscountry Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and Instrumental Variable (IV) regressions show that corruption, ethnic fractionalization and youth literacy are powerful predictors of YRH.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by University of Pittsburgh, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number
347.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: