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World Development Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 173186, 2000 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain 0305-750X/00/$ - see front matter

The Impact of Education, Income, and Mortality on Fertility in Jamaica

SUDHANSHU HANDA * International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC, USA
Summary. The socioeconomic determinants of cumulative and recent fertility are investigated with micro data from Jamaica, a middle-income country with low rates of infant mortality and total fertility. Infant mortality has a signicant nonlinear inuence on fertility, peaking at a mortality rate of 0.46. Both education and income have strong negative eects on births but the impact of education is larger; for rural women the birth elasticities are 0.15 and 0.45 for income and education, respectively. Finally, the transmission of the education eect appears to be through raising the value of time of the woman rather than changing preferences. 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Key words fertility, infant mortality, education, Jamaica, Caribbean

1. INTRODUCTION This paper investigates the socioeconomic determinants of fertility in Jamaica using one of the World Bank's Living Standard Measurement Surveys (LSMS)the Jamaica Survey of Living Conditions (SLC). Two specic questions regarding the fertility decision are dealt with. First, what is the impact of infant mortality on fertility in a low fertility society? Second, is the impact of female education larger than the impact of income in reducing fertility? Some initial explorations are also provided on the way female education aects fertility behavior: does education alter tastes for children or does it increase the value of time of the woman? Unlike other developing countries where LSMS data sets have allowed the opportunity to study fertility decisions, Jamaica is well on its way along the epidemiological transition, so its health problems resemble those of more developed countries (Peters, 1994). Hence the overall disease burden in Jamaica comes from life-style related noncommunicable chronic diseases such as hypertension, heart disease, and nuero-psychiatric conditions including substance dependency and schizophrenia. Jamaica's impressive social development record in general, and success at combatting infectious and childhood diseases in particular, are reected in its gross indicators of health,
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fertility and education. In 1970 the total fertility rate (TFR) was 5.3, above the 4.6 average for middle income countries (World Bank, 1994 and various years). In 1993 the TFR was 2.5 and below the 3.0 mean for middle-income countries. In this same time period infant mortality per 1,000 births dropped from 46 to 15, well below the mean of 43 for middle-income countries (World Bank, 1994). Finally, primary school enrollment is universal, and female enrollment and grade attainment is actually higher than that of males. Despite making the transition to a low-fertility society, Jamaica still suers from population pressure because of its small physical size. Population density is 218 per square kilometer which is eight times the average for middle-income countries and one of the highest in Latin America. This population pressure is putting enormous strain on Jamaica's environment. For example, during 198185 the average annual deforestation rate was 3.0%

* Thanks to the Planning Institute of Jamaica for kind

permission to use the data, Bill Milne for encouragement and valuable discussion, and two anonymous referees for useful comments. This research was conducted while I was a Lecturer in the Department of Economics, University of the West Indies-Mona, Jamaica. All errors are my own. Final revision accepted: 25 May 1999.

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compared to an average of 0.9% for all developing countries (UNDP, 1994). The next section of the paper describes the theoretical framework guiding the analysis of fertility behavior; section 3 presents the data and variables used in the empirical estimation of the impact of infant mortality, income and education on fertility; results are presented and discussed in section 4 and section 5 concludes the paper.

2. ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK The conceptual framework guiding the empirical implementation is a New Household Economics Model emphasizing the fact that households are both consumers and producers of goods and services (Becker, 1965). This model is well known (Becker, 1981; Birdsall, 1988; Rosenzweig & Schultz, 1983), and can be used to derive the demand for children as a function of a set of exogenous variables which can be classied into three broad groups, biological, economic, and social or culturalhere I focus on the economic determinants of the fertility decision. Write the reduced form demand for children as F F M ; H ; P ; l: 1

In this particular specication, M represents characteristics specic to the mother, H and P are vectors of household characteristics and prices respectively, while l is a random error with the usual properties. Variables specic to the mother include her education, age, previous fertility history, and her current union or marital status. Child services are time intensive, hence the value of a woman's time (measured by the wage rate) is an important cost in the household production of childrenin the absence of data on wages, education is often used as a proxy for the value of time. In Jamaica a woman's education is strongly associated with her earnings (Handa, 1995) and is thus expected to have a negative impact on fertility. Education can also inuence the supply of children by changing tastes, through improvements in health and nutrition, and by increasing the eective use of birth control as in ``synthesis'' models of fertility. While it is typically dicult to disentangle the various eects of eduction on fertility, I explore the extent to which education inuences ``tastes'' for children by observing its impact on the

number of children a woman desiredthis is discussed further in section 4. Age is the primary biological factor inuencing fertility, at rst positively, but then negatively due to malnutrition, disease and menopause. A woman's fertility history, in particular the proportion of previous births that have died, will be correlated with maternal depletion and weaning and thus also inuence the biological capacity for children. Infant mortality can also illicit two types of behavioral responses from mothers. First, a replacement response will induce additional children to replace the ones who die. Second, an anticipatory response will cause women to adapt their fertility behavior to known existing levels of child mortality. The latter behavior will be more common in high fertility societies; a main focus of this paper is to explore the relationship between child mortality and the number of births. The potential simultaneity between mortality and fertility is discussed in the next section. Finally, a woman's demand for children will be aected by her social and cultural surroundings. These include the degree of urbanization, the typical age of entry into longterm marital unions, and attitudes (religious or otherwise) toward sexual intercourse. To measure the exposure to sexual intercourse a dummy variable is used to indicate whether the woman is currently in a stable marital union (either common-law or married) 1; religion is not used since over 93% of Jamaicans practice some form of Protestantism. The primary household level variable of interest in this study is income, which will be positively related to the demand for children if children are normal goods. But if households have preferences over child quality and the income elasticity for quality is greater than the income elasticity for quantity, then income be may have a depressing eect on the number of children. Moreover, in some rural areas where child labor is an important source of family output and thus wealth, income is found to be positively related to the demand for children (Schultz, 1973), although this is unlikely to be the case in the plantation-style agriculture typical of Jamaica. Finally, the availability and cost of contraception will inuence the demand for children, especially in low-fertility societies such as Jamaica where families desire to control their completed family size. While the data set used in this study does not contain information on

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the cost of family planning services, these services are primarily delivered through public health facilities so I include variables indicating travel time (in hours) to the nearest public health centre and public hospital (National Family Planning Board, 1993). These travel time variables are often used in reduced form demand equations of human resource investment in developing countries as a proxy for prices (Benefo & Schultz, 1994; Strauss, 1990). 3. DATA, EMPIRICAL SPECIFICATION, AND SUMMARY STATISTICS The data used in the analysis come from the fertility module of the November 1989 round of the Jamaica SLC. 2 The fertility module of the SLC provides details on the number of births, deaths, and other fertility-related information for one woman age 1545 in each household. This module is merged with various sections of the SLC to obtain information on age, education, region of residence and other relevant variablesa total of 1,698 women are used in the nal analysis of which 54% live in rural areas. A reduced form demand relationship is estimated using two common measures of fertility as dependent variables: the total number of surviving births, and whether the woman was either pregnant or had given birth in the last 12 months, representing the ow or addition to the stock of children. 3 I also present some reduced form regressions on the determinants of infant mortality, focusing on the economic factors inuencing mortality and the interaction between education and community health services. Table 1 provides denitions and summary statistics of the variables used in the analysis. Variables common to both fertility outcomes are total per capita household expenditure (proxy for income), age and age squared, highest grade completed and its square, a dummy variable indicating if the woman is married or in a common-law union, travel time in hours to the nearest public health center and hospital, and the proportion of births that have died and its square. Per capita expenditure is used since the SLC does not contain income data; this is a common procedure in reduced-form household demand analyses based on LSMS data sets because of the absence of reliable income data, and because expenditure tends to be more reliable

than income data in developing countries (e.g., Thomas, Strauss & Henrique, 1990; Handa, 1996). Household expenditure is treated as endogenous and predicted using durable goods, type of dwelling (detached house, apartment, etc), main material of outer walls (brick, concrete, adobe, etc.), and whether the household received property income as identifying variables. The predicting regression had an Rsquare of 54% and is available from the authors upon request. The main empirical issue is the treatment of the mortality variable, which will be correlated with the error term of the fertility regressions for two reasons. First, there are likely to be unobserved factors (such as health-related knowledge) which aect both the propensity to have children and their subsequent survival probability. Second, there is potential simultaneity between the two variables since additional births lead to maternal depletion (and lower birth weight babies) while infant mortality curtails breastfeeding which leads to early fecundity. I follow the standard approach in the literature by using the individual mortality rate of each woman instead of the number of deaths (Olsen, 1980; Hyatt & Milne 1993; Maglad 1990; Chen, Bendarf & Hicks, 1987). In a recent paper, Benefo and Schultz (1994) treat the mortality rate as endogenous as well, and instrument it using health care access variables, but do not reject the null hypothesis of exogeneity. 4 The mortality variable is included in quadratic form to allow for a ``discouragement'' eect whereby women curtail further attempts at childbirth after it becomes clear that genetic or economic factors limit their ability to keep children alive. The ow regression contains two additional variables not included in the stock regression. The rst is the total number of surviving births (and its square) at the start of the period. Thus the decision to have another child is posited to depend on the current number of surviving children. Note that since fertility decisions are sequential the number of children at the beginning of the period can be considered exogenous to the current decision of whether to invest in another child. The second is a desire variable, which takes the value 1 if the woman desired another child at the beginning of the period. The desire variable is constructed by subtracting the number of surviving children at the beginning of the period from the total number of children

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Variable Endogenous variables Number of live births One if currently pregnant or had child in last year Number of child deaths Exogenous variables Predicted household per capita expenditures Age in years Age squared Highest grade completed Highest grade squared One if married or in common-law union Surviving births in previous period Previous period births squared One if desired children greater than surviving births in previous period (desire)a Mortality rate Mortality rate squared Hours to nearest public hospital Hours to nearest public health center Observations
a

Rural 2.266 (2.45) 0.172 (0.38) 0.139 (0.47) 8.326 (0.59) 27.254 (8.21) 810.094 (476.30) 9.168 (2.31) 89.365 (37.36) 0.503 (0.50) 1.998 (2.24) 9.667 (18.62) 0.622 (0.49) 0.037 (0.14) 0.021 (0.12) 0.230 (0.57) 0.818 (0.93) 912.00

Urban 1.912 (2.07) 0.122 (0.33) 0.128 (0.53) 8.804 (0.58) 27.316 (7.89) 808.239 (457.71) 9.679 (2.21) 98.562 (37.66) 0.443 (0.50) 1.695 (1.89) 6.799 (13.71) 0.635 (0.48) 0.035 (0.13) 0.019 (0.10) 0.043 (0.22) 0.148 (0.40) 786.00

904 observations for rural and 776 observations for urban due to missing values for desired number of children.

desired by the woman. If this dierence is positive (so that the woman desired more children than she had at the beginning of the period) the desire variable is set to 1. The desire variable may be a source of misspecication because it is constructed from a potentially problematic question: the number of children a woman desires in her life. Women may rationalize their present family size and thus overstate the number of desired children, while others may understate the number of desired children based on previous child bearing experience (Rosenzweig & Wolpin, 1993). I try and minimize the misspecication by not including desired children directly in the regression and constructing the dummy variable instead, but in general it is hard to predict the direction of bias if any, 5 and equally dicult to think of an instrumental variable that

would aect the desired number of children but not current pregnancy. 6 In the estimates below I report a model where ``desire'' is instrumented using 14 religious dummies, age of menstruation, and age of cohabitation for identication. These estimates, however, should be treated with caution. Only age of cohabitation was statistically signicant, and in the urban subsample the joint test for signicance of the instrumental variables had a p-value of 0.17. Formal statistical tests rejected the null hypothesis of equality of coecients across regions in all regressions, hence separate models are estimated for rural and urban women. 7 The means in Table 1 indicate that rural women have more births (2.27 vs. 1.91) and are more likely to have had a recent fertility experience (17.2% vs. 12.2%) than

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urban women. The number of deaths is also slightly higher in rural areas (0.139 vs. 0.128) although the mortality rate is virtually the same (3.7% vs. 3.5%). Jamaica's excellent social development record mentioned earlier is reected in a mean grade attainment of women of approximately nine. 8 Note also that rural households are poorer and must travel longer to get to a public health facility. 4. RESULTS (a) Mortality The rst two columns of Table 2 present the coecient estimates for the regressions determining the number of child deaths, and they indicate considerable dierences by region. For urban women none of the point estimates are signicant although the regression as a whole is. In contrast both income and education are signicant determinants of child mortality among rural women. The eect of education is smallan additional year of schooling at the mean reduces the number of deaths by 0.019, and the turning point is approximately seven

years of schooling. On the other hand a proportional increase in per capita expenditure reduces the number of deaths by 0.055. 9 The availability of public health services does not have a signicant direct inuence on mortality. But the benet of these services on child health may depend on the level of education of the child's mother. For example, better educated mother's may be more ecient users of local health services in which case these services would be complements to education in the production of child health. On the other hand, health services may provide a greater benet to less educated mothers and thus serve as substitute inputs to education in determining child health, and would also lessen the impact of educational dierences (Rosenzweig & Schultz, 1982). To see if the benet of local health services is dierent for women with dierent levels of education, the travel time variables are interacted with education and included in the reduced form regression for mortality in the last two columns of Table 2. The results indicate no signicant interaction among rural women, but a signicant interaction between education and public hospitals for urban

Table 2. OLS estimates for number of child deathsa Variable Log PC expenditure Age Age squared Highest grade Grade squared Married Hours to hospital Hours to health centre Hospital grade Health center grade Adjusted R-squared F-Test Mean of Dep. variable
a *

(1) Rural 0.055 (1.89) 0.009 (0.60) 0.000 (0.18) 0.071 (2.33) 0.005 (2.55) 0.028 (0.75) 0.010 (0.49) 0.032 (0.97)

(2) Urban 0.026 (0.73) 0.016 (0.85) 0.000 (0.19) 0.075 (1.56) 0.002 (0.89) 0.005 (0.11) 0.014 (0.28) 0.121 (1.30)

(3) Rural 0.055 (1.87) 0.009 (0.60) 0.00 (0.18) 0.070 (2.10) 0.005 (2.47) 0.028 (0.75) 0.009 (0.10) 0.005 (0.27) 0.002 (0.21) 0.005 (0.27) 4.80 5.28 0.14

(4) Urban 0.026 (0.73) 0.011 (0.61) 0.00 (0.05) 0.025 (0.49) 0.000 (0.13) 0.004 (0.10) 0.517 (2.06) 0.527 (1.72) 0.050 (2.04) 0.045 (1.45) 7.45 5.90 0.13

5.91 6.60 0.14

5.14 6.03 0.13

Constant term not reported. Absolute t-statistics in parenthesis below coecient estimates. Signicant at the 10% level. ** Signicant at the 5% level.

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women. The negative inuence of education on infant mortality is enhanced the farther a woman lives to an urban public hospital. Hence in urban Jamaica, public hospitals and women's education are substitutes. The SLC questionnaire does not explicitly specify an age limit for child deaths, hence there is the possibility that the death of older children may be included in the mortality data. To control for the possible exposure time to death implied by this problem, I also estimated the models in Table 2 using the mortality rate (or propensity to child death) as the dependent variable. These models were poorly dened, however, with no statistically signicant coefcient estimates, and in the rural sample the model as a whole was also insignicant. (b) Number of births Table 3 presents the estimation results for the stock of children by region. The regressions explain approximately 50% of the variation in

births, and almost all the coecients are statistically signicant. The individual infant mortality rate has a strong statistical and nonlinear impact on the total number of births in the hypothesized manner. The mortality rate coecients, when evaluated at the mean, imply that a doubling of the individual mortality rate will increase the number of births by 0.45 for rural women and 0.28 for urban women. 10 The mortality rate has a depressing eect on births after approximately 0.46 for both subsamples 11 and the implied replacement response is very high. Table 4 summarizes the replacement response estimated using the various techniques found in the literature. In the rst row, the ordinary least squares (OLS) coecient of deaths on births is corrected using recommendation (D) from Trussell and Olsen (1983, p. 38). 12 In the second row the number of deaths is instrumented with the mortality rate as discussed in Olsen (1980), and in row 3 the mortality rate is entered linearly and the replacement response

Table 3. Estimates for total births and recent fertilitya Variable Log PC expenditure Age Age squared Highest grade Grade squared Married Mortality rate Mortality rate squared Hours to hospital Hours to health centre Previous period births Previous period births squared Adjusted R-squared F-Test Log likelihood Chi-squared
a **

Number of births (OLS) Rural 1.270 (12.43) 0.201 (3.94) 0.001 (1.01) 0.257 (2.41) 0.020 (2.98) 0.818 (6.32) 13.171 (11.95) 14.078 (10.68) 0.054 (0.75) 0.018 (0.16) Urban 0.884 (8.86) 0.392 (7.71) 0.005 (5.24) 0.335 (2.49) 0.026 (3.40) 0.415 (3.50) 8.560 (7.99) 9.437 (6.53) 0.019 (0.13) 0.093 (0.36)

Recent fertility (Probit) Rural 0.559 (5.14) 0.217 (3.26) 0.005 (4.00) 0.031 (0.27) 0.002 (0.32) 0.771 (5.63) 4.921 (2.52) 10.238 (2.06) 0.035 (0.53) 0.112 (1.05) 0.254 (3.68) 0.029 (4.65) 332.65 136.78 Urban 0.434 (3.57) 0.209 (2.86) 0.004 (3.00) 0.027 (0.16) 0.002 (0.10) 0.656 (4.68) 1.360 (0.82) 2.847 (0.95) 0.191 (0.99) 0.218 (0.05) 0.417 (4.87) 0.044 (5.20) 249.15 68.37

57.37 115.11

48.91 72.13

Constant term not reported. Absolute t-statistics in parenthesis below coecient estimates. Signicant at the 5% level.

FERTILITY IN JAMAICA Table 4. Estimates of replacement response Estimation method OLSa IVb Linear mortality ratec
a

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Coecient estimate Rural 1.708 (14.57) 0.943 (5.52) 2.245 (5.14) Urban 1.189 (12.12) 0.691 (5.20) 2.124 (4.91)

Implied replacement Rural 0.70 0.94 0.99 Urban 0.66 0.69 1.10

Births regressed on number of deaths via OLS, and coecient corrected using method described in text. Number of deaths instrumented using the mortality rate as instrument. c Births regressed on the mortality rate in linear form using OLS and the replacement response recovered using method described in text.
b

derived according to the formula in Olsen (1980, p. 433). Both rural and urban replacement is very high, with the estimates reaching 1 for the model where the mortality rate is entered linearly. These replacement rates are much higher than the 0.20 range reported by ^te Benefo and Schultz (1994) for Ghana and Co d'Ivoire LSMS data sets, and are among the highest reported for developing countries. The other results are plausible and intuitive. The number of births decreases with household income (quadratics in income are not signicant), and increases linearly with age for rural women but decreases after age 39 for urban women. The eect of education is highly signicant and nonlinear: at low levels of education there is a positive relationship between

schooling and births, which peaks at grade 6 (end of primary school in Jamaica), the minimum level of education required to achieve and maintain functional literacy. Education has a larger impact in reducing fertility than income. Evaluated at the means, the elasticity of births with respect to income is 0.15 for rural women (0.10 for urban) compared to an elasticity with respect to education of 0.45 (0.86 for urban). 13 The interaction between mortality, education and total fertility can be seen clearly in Figures 1 and 2 which traces the relationship between number of deaths and births for a married woman of age 27 with various levels of schooling, based on the coecient estimates in the rst two columns of Table 3. 14 The gure

Figure 1. Estimated relationship between births and mortality rate by education (rural) (OLS).

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Figure 2. Estimated relationship between births and mortality rate by education (urban) (OLS).

shows the nonlinear relationship between births and the individual mortality rate which peaks at approximately 0.46 in both regions. There are three salient features about the graphs. First, the urban graph is lower and atter than the rural one indicating that urban women have fewer children, and the impact of mortality on births is larger among rural women. Second, the relationship between the mortality rate and births is virtually the same among women with primary education (grade 6) and the mean level of education (grade 9); the eect of education on the mortalitybirths relationship is not felt until grade 12 education is attained. Third, the impact of grade 12 versus grade 9 education is greater in urban areas. The latter is consistent with both a ``value of time'' hypothesis and a ``tastes and preferences'' hypothesis of the role of education in determining fertility behavior. Secondary school graduates have more incomeearning opportunities in urban areas of Jamaica, and are also more likely to be exposed to alternative life-styles and social groups which would aect preferences. In either case the results indicate that the expansion of secondary schooling beyond grade 9 for women can have an important impact on fertility. The OLS estimates presented in Table 3 include a quadratic in age but this may not fully control for the fact that the number of births is a truncated variable since younger women will have had less time to have children. To assess the robustness of the results in Table 3, I esti-

mated the model specifying the number of births as a Poisson variable and using the woman's age to explicitly measure exposure time. Full results of this procedure are available from the author, but simulations based on these Poisson estimates using the same assumptions as before are presented in Figures 3 and 4. The results are virtually identical to those of Figures 3 and 4 based on the OLS specication: the relationship between births and the mortality rate is stronger in rural areas, and the biggest dierence in fertility is between 9th and 12th grade. (c) Recent or current fertility Columns 3 and 4 in Table 3 present the probit results for probability of a recent pregnancy by region, and there are some interesting dierences between these estimates and those for the stock of children. The most important dierence is the lack of signicance of the education variables in determining current fertility behavior. It could be that the eect of education is primarily transmitted through the stock variable, but when these variables are dropped the education terms are still not signicant, nor are they signicant when the mortality variables are excluded. 15 The stock variable itself is somewhat anomalous, indicating the probability of a recent pregnancy rst declines with the number of surviving children until 4.6 for rural women

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Figure 3. Estimated relationship between births and mortality rate by education (rural) (POISSON).

Figure 4. Estimated relationship between births and mortality rate by education (urban) (POISSON).

(4.4 for urban) and then increases. Hence in this sample the women most likely to have just had a child are those with either very small or large families. The impact of age in the probit equations is also signicantly nonlinear, but peaks at a much earlier age (21 for rural and 27 for urban women) than in the stock regressions. Another interesting dierence between the stock and ow results is the estimated impact of the mortality rate. For urban women mortality

is insignicant, but for rural women it continues to be signicant and nonlinear, peaking at 0.24. The impact of the death rate on the probability of a recent pregnancy is shown in Fig. 5 for a married woman, 27 years of age and grade 9 education (other variables evaluated at their means) using the probit coecients in Table 3. The graph indicates that for rural women, the probability of a recent or current pregnancy drops to zero at very high rates of mortality.

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Figure 5. Estimated relationship between recent pregnancy and mortality rate by region.

The relationship for urban women is also plotted but the coecient estimates in this subsample are not signicantly dierent from zero. (d) Desired fertility Columns 1 and 2 in Table 5 include the desire dummy variable in the recent fertility probit model and it is positive and highly signicant for both urban and rural women. Inclusion of this variable reduces the estimated impact of previous births and mortality (and their squares) on the probability of a recent pregnancy, and the linear births term becomes insignicant for rural women. The quantitative impact of desiring another child on the probability of becoming pregnant is shown in Figures 6 and 7 for a married woman, aged 27 with grade 9 education (other variables evaluated at their means). 16 The impact is much greater for rural women, peaking at around age 23 when the estimated increase in the probability of becoming pregnant is 30%, and remaining positive until age 44. For urban women the probability of a recent pregnancy is generally lower than for rural women, and so is the estimated impact of desiring another child, although this (smaller) impact persists for a longer period. The eect of desiring a child is low at young ages, peaks at age 27 when the increase in the probability of becoming pregnant is 10%, and nally diminishes at age 46.

The urbanrural dierence in the estimated impact of desiring another child shown in Figs. 6 and 7 suggest that urban women tend to delay child bearing to later in the life-cycle, and those who desire a child are less likely to immediately have one than rural women, possibly because of the higher cost of raising a child in urban areas. 17 It is interesting to note that in this data set the mean of the ``desire'' variable is actually slightly higher for urban women. This is because the mean desired number of children (not shown) is higher among urban than rural women (2.8 vs. 2.76) even though urban women have lower fertility. This suggests that urban women continue to have a preference for children but must modify their fertility behavior due to economic or other constraints. Hence the negative impact of education observed in the births regressions must primarily represent a ``value-of-time'' eect for urban women. When desired number of children is regressed on income and schooling, each are negative but only marginally signicant for urban women (p values of approximately 0.12). But income is highly signicant and negative for rural women (with a coecient 33% higher than the coecient for urban women) but education is insignicant. These results also imply that education does not aect fertility through changing tastes for children. The last two columns of Table 5 present the results when desire is predicted using a probit regression with religion (14 dummies), age of

FERTILITY IN JAMAICA Table 5. Probit estimates of the impact of desiring a child on recent fertilitya Variable Log PC expenditure Age Age squared Highest grade Grade squared Married Mortality rate Mortality rate squared Hours to hospital Hours to health centre Previous period births Previous period births squared Desire Desire (residual)c Log likelihood Chi-squared
a b

183

Rural 0.557 (5.02) 0.214 (3.15) 0.005 (3.87) 0.008 (0.06) 0.001 (0.13) 0.781 (5.57) 3.736 (1.92) 8.165 (1.69) 0.034 (0.49) 0.097 (0.89) 0.064 (0.81) 0.019 (2.93) 0.788 (4.59) 319.67 155.81

Urban 0.443 (3.55) 0.214 (2.84) 0.004 (2.99) 0.003 (0.02) 0.001 (0.08) 0.676 (4.57) 1.074 (0.66) 2.394 (0.84) 0.195 (0.99) 0.228 (0.69) 0.288 (2.97) 0.037 (4.16) 0.560 (2.85) 242.31 77.16

Instrumental Variableb Rural 0.401 (2.73) 0.089 (1.06) 0.003 (2.30) 0.101 (0.77) 0.005 (0.63) 0.681 (4.57) 3.793 (1.92) 8.485 (1.74) 0.034 (0.46) 0.121 (1.05) 0.118 (1.41) 0.021 (3.20) 0.153 (0.19) 0.863 (1.11) 294.12 140.11 Urban 0.306 (1.69) 0.017 (0.14) 0.001 (0.30) 0.105 (0.57) 0.008 (0.75) 0.621 (3.86) 0.611 (0.24) 3.166 (0.55) 0.331 (1.50) 0.099 (0.27) 0.326 (3.22) 0.040 (4.36) 0.554 (0.56) 1.130 (1.14) 215.35 75.18

Constant term not reported. Absolute t-statistics in parenthesis. Desire treated as endogenous and instrumented with religion, age of menstruation, and age of rst cohabitation. c Residual from stage one regression predicting desire. ** Signicant at the 5% level.

Figure 6. One-year probability of child birth for women who desire and do not desire a childrural region.

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Figure 7. One-year probability of child birth for women who desire and do not desire a childurban region.

menstruation, and age of rst cohabitation as identifying instruments. Following the recommendation of Rivers and Vuong (1988) for the treatment of an endogenous variable in a probit model, the residual from the stage one regression predicting desire, as well as the original desire variable, are both included in the probit regression. The t-test on the coecient of the residual term is actually a test for endogeneity of the desire variable (the null hypothesis is exogeneity). In both rural and urban areas the coecient of desire is reduced and no longer signicant, while the t-tests for the coecient of the residual terms, though greater than 1, are also insignicant. As mentioned earlier there are several potential sources of contamination associated with desire: the results here indicate that endogeneity is the dominant source of misspecication since the estimated coecients become smaller, but this should not be emphasized because of the poor performance of the identifying instruments in the stage one regression. 5. CONCLUSIONS The eect of mortality on fertility in Jamaica is highly signicant and nonlinear, peaking at a mortality rate of 0.46 with a replacement response close to 1. This high replacement

response exists, however, in a low-fertility environment where the mean number of deaths is only 0.13, and is thus unlikely to have a signicant eect on the size of the population. Indeed the World Bank (1994) has predicted that Jamaica will reach replacement levels of fertility by the year 2000. Both income and education have signicant negative eects on the number of births, with the impact of education being larger than that of income: the point elasticities in rural areas are 0.45 and 0.15 for education and income, respectively. The inuence of education becomes negative only after grade 6, and the simulations show that expanding education beyond grade 9 can have a particularly large eect on fertility, especially for urban women. In addition, the transmission of the education eect appears to occur through raising the value of time for the woman rather than changing tastes or desire for children. There are substantial dierences in the estimated impact of education and infant mortality when recent fertility is used as the outcome measure. Education is no longer signicant and mortality becomes insignicant among urban women. One possible explanation for this is that the impact of education is long term in nature and thus more likely to inuence life time fertility rather than fertility in any given year.

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NOTES
1. Montgomery, Kouame and Oliver (1995) and others have argued that marital status is endogenous to fertility decisions and should not be included in the reduced form. In Jamaica, however, most rst pregnancies occur outside of stable unions, and in fact, the country has one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancies in the world. In the present context therefore, the potential simultaneity bias associated with this variable seems minimal. 2. Technical details of the sample design and survey method can be found in Grosh (1991). 3. Only current pregnancy is reported in the fertility module. Recent fertility (last 12 months) was constructed by matching women with the age of their children from the household roster. 4. Their estimates are based on the assumption that health care access aects infant mortality but not fertility. In the present data, however, access to health facilities will inuence the cost of acquiring contraceptives and birth control informationthis information therefore also belongs in the fertility regressions. 5. It is possible the two sources of reporting error cancel each other. On the other hand, there is another source of measurement error due to the fact that women may interpret the question in dierent ways (e.g., how many more children do you desire?). 6. Family background variables such as parental education or number of siblings might arguably be used as identifying instruments but these are not available in the SLC except for women under 18 years of age. 7. For the OLS specications this is an F-Test; for the probits it is a likelihood ratio test. Results are available from the author upon request. 8. Jamaica is one of the few developing countries where women outperform men in virtually all aspects of education including primary school achievement (measured by Common Entrance Examination scores), secondary and tertiary enrolment, and grade attainment (Handa, 1995). 9. When an independent variable is measured in logs, its coecient represents the change in the dependent variable given a proportional change in the independent variable. The SLC questionnaire does not explicitly specify an age limit for child deaths, hence there is the possibility that the death of older children may be included in the mortality data. To control for the possible exposure time to death implied by this problem, I also estimated the models in Table 2 using the mortality rate (or propensity to child death) as the dependent variable. These models were poorly dened, with no statistically signicant coecient estimates, and in the rural sample the model as a whole was also insignicant. 10. This is calculated by evaluating the derivative of births with respect to the mortality rate at the mean mortality rate for each region, and then multiplying by the respective mean for each region. 11. 2.3% of rural women and 3.1% of urban women had mortality rates greater than 0.46. 12. In the Jamaican case, the within parity variance in mortality is small, but the variance of deaths is much smaller than predicted by equation (3) in Trussell and Olsen (1983). This implies that the mortality rate is not random, and the OLS correction shown in Table 4 is likely to underestimate the true replacement response. 13. In the current sample 10% of women are still studying. Since these tend to be younger women who would have had less time to have children, the impact of education reported here is probably slightly underestimated. 14. The regression is estimated at the means of the other variables (income and travel time to health facilities). 15. Models were also estimated for older and younger age groups to see if the education variables were important for younger cohorts of women but they were not. 16. Note that the variable ``age squared'' will also vary according to the value of age. This is what generates the particular nonlinear pattern in these graphs, since in principle probit predictions must always generate nonlinear eects given that the functional form itself is nonlinear. 17. Urban jobs are often more inexible and thus less compatible with child care.

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