Did Infant Mortality Decline cause Fertility Decline? Evidence from a Panel Data Analysis of Developing Countries
Amarendra Sharma ()
Economics Bulletin, 2015, vol. 35, issue 1, 283-290
Abstract:
The nexus between infant mortality decline and fertility decline has been the subject matter of several theoretical and empirical investigations. However, this relationship still remains an open question, as the literature provides only mixed empirical evidence. We investigate this relationship by using a panel data of 47 developing countries from 1960-2012. Using system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation, which allows us to control for potential endogeneity of infant mortality in fertility regression, we conclude that the decrease in infant mortality did not result in the observed fertility decline (a positive association); on the contrary, we observe a negative relationship to exist between the two. This result casts some doubt on Barro-Becker (1989) assertion that altruistic parents favored children's quality over quantity in the presence of declining infant mortality, which led to fertility decline.
Keywords: Fertility; Infant Mortality; Demographic Transition; System GMM (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J1 O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-03-11
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.accessecon.com/Pubs/EB/2015/Volume35/EB-15-V35-I1-P32.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:ebl:ecbull:eb-15-00129
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Economics Bulletin from AccessEcon
Bibliographic data for series maintained by John P. Conley ().