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

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  • Manoel Bittencourt

    ()

    (Department of Economics, University of Pretoria)

Abstract

In this paper we investigate whether secondary school enrolment has played any role on total fertility rates in all fifteen members of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) between 1980 and 2009. The evidence, based on panel time-series analysis (we make use of the Pooled OLS, Fixed Effects and Fixed Effects with Instrumental Variables estimators), robustly suggest that education has indeed reduced fertility rates in the region, or that the community is already trading-off quantity for quality of children. The results are important not only because lower fertility, caused by education, implies more capital per worker, higher productivity and therefore higher growth rates, but also because in accordance to the unified growth theory they suggest that southern Africa is experiencing its own transition from the Malthusian epoch into a sustained (modern) growth regime.

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Paper provided by University of Pretoria, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number 201402.

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Length: 27 pages
Date of creation: Jan 2014
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:pre:wpaper:201402
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Keywords: Education; fertility; Africa;

Other versions of this item:

Find related papers by JEL classification:
  • I20 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - General
  • J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
  • O55 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies - - - Africa

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Cited by:

  1. Manoel Bittencourt, 2014. "Primary Education and Fertility Rates in Southern Africa: Evidence from Before the Demographic Transition," Working Papers 432, Economic Research Southern Africa.

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