Publication: The Fertility Impacts of Development Programs
Loading...
Date
2024-07-17
ISSN
Published
2024-07-17
Editor(s)
Abstract
This paper examines how women’s fertility responds to increases in their earnings and household wealth, using six experiments conducted in Sub-Saharan Africa. Contrary to predictions that an increase in female earnings raises the opportunity cost of childbearing and that this will lower fertility, the findings show that an increase in the profits of female business-owners in Ethiopia and Togo results in them having more children. The findings also show a positive fertility response to increases in the value of household assets induced by land formalization programs in Benin and Ghana. These results are driven by women who are in most need of sons for support in old age or in the event of widowhood. The findings suggest that women’s lack of long-term economic security is an important driver of fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Donald, Aletheia; Goldstein, Markuz; Koroknay-Palicz, Tricia; Sage, Mathilde. 2024. The Fertility Impacts of Development Programs. Policy Research Working Paper; 10848. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/41890 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication Geopolitics and the World Trading System(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-23)Until the beginning of this century, the GATT/WTO system worked. Economic research provided a compelling explanation. It showed that if governments maximize the well-being of their own countries broadly defined, GATT/WTO principles would facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation over their trade policy choices. Now heightened geopolitical rivalry seems to have undermined the WTO. A simple transposition of the previous rationalization suggests that geopolitics and trade cooperation are not compatible. The paper shows that this is only true if rivalry eclipses any consideration of own-country well-being. In all other circumstances, there are gains from trade cooperation even with geopolitics. Furthermore, the WTO’s relevance is in question only if it adheres too rigidly to its existing rules and norms. Through measured adaptation to the geopolitical imperative, the WTO can continue to thrive as a forum for multilateral trade cooperation in the age of geopolitics.Publication The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.Publication Global Poverty Revisited Using 2021 PPPs and New Data on Consumption(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-05)Recent improvements in survey methodologies have increased measured consumption in many low- and lower-middle-income countries that now collect a more comprehensive measure of household consumption. Faced with such methodological changes, countries have frequently revised upward their national poverty lines to make them appropriate for the new measures of consumption. This in turn affects the World Bank’s global poverty lines when they are periodically revised. The international poverty line, which is based on the typical poverty line in low-income countries, increases by around 40 percent to $3.00 when the more recent national poverty lines as well as the 2021 purchasing power parities are incorporated. The net impact of the changes in international prices, the poverty line, and new survey data (including new data for India) is an increase in global extreme poverty by some 125 million people in 2022, and a significant shift of poverty away from South Asia and toward Sub-Saharan Africa. The changes at higher poverty lines, which are more relevant to middle-income countries, are mixed.Publication Global Socio-economic Resilience to Natural Disasters(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-22)Most disaster risk assessments use damages to physical assets as their central metric, often neglecting distributional impacts and the coping and recovery capacity of affected people. To address this shortcoming, the concepts of well-being losses and socio-economic resilience—the ability to experience asset losses without a decline in well-being—have been proposed. This paper uses microsimulations to produce a global estimate of well-being losses from, and socio-economic resilience to, natural disasters, covering 132 countries. On average, each $1 in disaster-related asset losses results in well-being losses equivalent to a $2 uniform national drop in consumption, with significant variation within and across countries. The poorest income quintile within each country incurs only 9% of national asset losses but accounts for 33% of well-being losses. Compared to high-income countries, low-income countries experience 67% greater well-being losses per dollar of asset losses and require 56% more time to recover. Socio-economic resilience is uncorrelated with exposure or vulnerability to natural hazards. However, a 10 percent increase in GDP per capita is associated with a 0.9 percentage point gain in resilience, but this benefit arises indirectly—such as through higher rate of formal employment, better financial inclusion, and broader social protection coverage—rather than from higher income itself. This paper assess ten policy options and finds that socio-economic and financial interventions (such as insurance and social protection) can effectively complement asset-focused measures (e.g., construction standards) and that interventions targeting low-income populations usually have higher returns in terms of avoided well-being losses per dollar invested.Publication From Patriarchy to Policy(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Legal institutions play an important role in shaping gender equality in economic domains, from inheritance to labor markets. But where do gender equal laws come from? Using cross-country data on social norms and legal equality, this paper investigates the socio-cultural roots of gender inequity in the legal system and its implications for female labor force participation. To identify the impact of social norms, the analysis uses an empirical strategy that exploits pre-modern differences in ancestral patriarchal culture as an instrument for present-day gender norms. The findings show that ancestral patriarchal culture is a strong predictor of contemporary norms, and conservative social norms are associated with more gender inequality in the de jure legal framework, the de facto implementation of laws, and the labor market. The paper presents evidence for a political selection mechanism linking norms to laws: countries with more conservative norms elect political leaders who are more hostile to gender equality, who then pass less progressive legislation. The results highlight the cultural roots and political drivers of legalized gender inequality.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication From Collateral to Cashflow(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-04-15)Women in Nigeria are starting and growing businesses at a remarkable rate offering a vast untapped market for business lending. The World Bank, through its Nigeria Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi), partnered with the Development Bank of Nigeria (DBN) and two commercial banks in Nigeria – Access Bank and Sterling Bank – to develop innovative credit solutions that expand access to finance for women entrepreneurs. This case study summarizes key lessons from this work, including an initial diagnostic; an assessment of demand for business loans; analysis of SMEs who applied to and/or received Access Bank cashflow loans; and administrative data from Access Bank’s cashflow loan program. Our objective is to provide insights into the successes and challenges of disbursing loans to women-led SMEs (WSMEs) in Nigeria. This research is being conducted in partnership with the World Bank’s Africa Gender Innovation Lab (GIL), which is also carrying out an impact evaluation that will capture how cashflow-based lending impacts male- vs female-led firms’ access to credit and business performance.Publication The Limits of Commitment(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-10)Working with a private bank in Ghana, this study examines the impacts of a commitment savings product designed to help clients taking repeated overdrafts break their debt cycles. Overall, the product significantly increased savings with the bank without increasing overdrafts. However, after accounting for other sources of savings, the study finds that clients with above-median baseline overdraft histories do not accrue new savings during the commitment period. Rather, they draw down other savings to offset the committed amount and take on new debt. In contrast, individuals with below-median overdraft histories significantly increase savings during and after the commitment period.Publication Sex, Lies, and Surveys(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-02)This paper examines how easily observable interviewer characteristics, such as gender and physical attractiveness, and more difficult to observe characteristics, such as attitudes and beliefs, affect adolescent girls' disclosure of sexual behavior during a baseline survey for an adolescent girls program in Liberia. The study finds that girls are more likely to report sexual activity to better-looking interviewers, and less likely to do so to interviewers holding more discriminatory gender attitudes and greater expectations about the program. The study finds no evidence that the gender of the interviewer matters.Publication The Africa Gender Innovation Lab’s Core Empowerment Indicators(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-08)To advance economic gender equality in Africa, the authors first need to know which development programs work to economically empower women. Better data on gender-informed development indicators is imperative for tracking the progress in promoting gender equality, designing interventions to address gender-based constraints and rigorously evaluating their impact. Measurement of women’s economic empowerment requires a clear conceptualization of what empowerment is and is not. One guiding definition that the authors use at the Africa gender innovation lab (GIL) is economic empowerment as the ability and power to generate income and accumulate assets, and to control their disposition. Beyond being clear on what is being measured, how it is measured also matters - and selecting the best tools for the task is no easy feat. In impact evaluations, tailoring measurement to reflect local economic arrangements and capture the specific pathway the project is intending to affect can yield a more precise (and useful) picture of women’s economic empowerment. On the other hand, systematically tracking the same indicators across projects can provide a broader understanding of the relationship between intermediate and final empowerment outcomes, as well as between different empowerment domains, such as assets, mobility, time, attitudes, and aspirations. Moreover, practitioners and policymakers have emphasized the need for a concise set of practical metrics that can be easily shared and used.Publication Assessing Workplace Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Skills in Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-21)Social, emotional, and behavioral skills are critical for success across life domains, yet research is constrained by a lack of internationally validated measures for adult populations. Existing tools often assess isolated skills and are predominantly validated in Western, school- aged samples. To address these limitations, this study developed and validated the Effective Socio-emotional skills To gain Economic EMpowerment framework, comprising 14 distinct social, emotional, and behavioral skills with prior demonstrated relevance to economic outcomes. The framework’s self-report scales were tested among adults in six Sub-Saharan African countries (Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, the Republic of Congo, Rwanda, South Africa, and Tanzania), spanning diverse cultural and linguistic contexts (English, French, Hausa, Swahili, and Yoruba). The results confirm the psychometric validity of the scales, supporting their utility in both research and practice. The framework categorizes skills as intrapersonal or interpersonal, awareness or management, and agentic or communal, providing a robust tool to unpack which skills matter for employment and earnings and how this differs by gender. By enabling exploration of social, emotional, and behavioral skills in underrepresented and cross-cultural contexts, use of the Effective Socio-emotional skills To gain Economic EMpowerment self-report scales advances theoretical and practical understanding of social, emotional, and behavioral skills in adult populations.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication World Development Report 2004(World Bank, 2003)Too often, services fail poor people in access, in quality, and in affordability. But the fact that there are striking examples where basic services such as water, sanitation, health, education, and electricity do work for poor people means that governments and citizens can do a better job of providing them. Learning from success and understanding the sources of failure, this year’s World Development Report, argues that services can be improved by putting poor people at the center of service provision. How? By enabling the poor to monitor and discipline service providers, by amplifying their voice in policymaking, and by strengthening the incentives for providers to serve the poor. Freedom from illness and freedom from illiteracy are two of the most important ways poor people can escape from poverty. To achieve these goals, economic growth and financial resources are of course necessary, but they are not enough. The World Development Report provides a practical framework for making the services that contribute to human development work for poor people. With this framework, citizens, governments, and donors can take action and accelerate progress toward the common objective of poverty reduction, as specified in the Millennium Development Goals.Publication Empowerment in Practice : From Analysis to Implementation(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2006)This book represents an effort to present an easily accessible framework to readers, especially those for whom empowerment remains a puzzling development concern, conceptually and in application. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 explains how the empowerment framework can be used for understanding, measuring, monitoring, and operationalizing empowerment policy and practice. Part 2 presents summaries of each of the five country studies, using them to discuss how the empowerment framework can be applied in very different country and sector contexts and what lessons can be learned from these test cases. While this book can offer only a limited empirical basis for the positive association between empowerment and development outcomes, it does add to the body of work supporting the existence of such a relationship. Perhaps more importantly, it also provides a framework for future research to test the association and to prioritize practical interventions seeking to empower individuals and groups.Publication Digital Progress and Trends Report 2023(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-03-05)Digitalization is the transformational opportunity of our time. The digital sector has become a powerhouse of innovation, economic growth, and job creation. Value added in the IT services sector grew at 8 percent annually during 2000–22, nearly twice as fast as the global economy. Employment growth in IT services reached 7 percent annually, six times higher than total employment growth. The diffusion and adoption of digital technologies are just as critical as their invention. Digital uptake has accelerated since the COVID-19 pandemic, with 1.5 billion new internet users added from 2018 to 2022. The share of firms investing in digital solutions around the world has more than doubled from 2020 to 2022. Low-income countries, vulnerable populations, and small firms, however, have been falling behind, while transformative digital innovations such as artificial intelligence (AI) have been accelerating in higher-income countries. Although more than 90 percent of the population in high-income countries was online in 2022, only one in four people in low-income countries used the internet, and the speed of their connection was typically only a small fraction of that in wealthier countries. As businesses in technologically advanced countries integrate generative AI into their products and services, less than half of the businesses in many low- and middle-income countries have an internet connection. The growing digital divide is exacerbating the poverty and productivity gaps between richer and poorer economies. The Digital Progress and Trends Report series will track global digitalization progress and highlight policy trends, debates, and implications for low- and middle-income countries. The series adds to the global efforts to study the progress and trends of digitalization in two main ways: · By compiling, curating, and analyzing data from diverse sources to present a comprehensive picture of digitalization in low- and middle-income countries, including in-depth analyses on understudied topics. · By developing insights on policy opportunities, challenges, and debates and reflecting the perspectives of various stakeholders and the World Bank’s operational experiences. This report, the first in the series, aims to inform evidence-based policy making and motivate action among internal and external audiences and stakeholders. The report will bring global attention to high-performing countries that have valuable experience to share as well as to areas where efforts will need to be redoubled.Publication Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2022(Washington, DC : World Bank, 2022)Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2022: Correcting Course provides the first comprehensive analysis of the pandemic’s toll on poverty in developing countries. It identifies how governments can optimize fiscal policy to help correct course. Fiscal policies offset the impact of COVID-19 on poverty in many high-income countries, but those policies offset barely one quarter of the pandemic’s impact in low-income countries and lower-middle-income countries. Improving support to households as crises continue will require reorienting protective spending away from generally regressive and inefficient subsidies and toward a direct transfer support system—a first key priority. Reorienting fiscal spending toward supporting growth is a second key priority identified by the report. Some of the highest-value public spending often pays out decades later. Amid crises, it is difficult to protect such investments, but it is essential to do so. Finally, it is not enough just to spend wisely - when additional revenue does need to be mobilized, it must be done in a way that minimizes reductions in poor people’s incomes. The report highlights how exploring underused forms of progressive taxation and increasing the efficiency of tax collection can help in this regard. Poverty and Shared Prosperity is a biennial series that reports on global trends in poverty and shared prosperity. Each report also explores a central challenge to poverty reduction and boosting shared prosperity, assessing what works well and what does not in different settings. By bringing together the latest evidence, this corporate flagship report provides a foundation for informed advocacy around ending extreme poverty and improving the lives of the poorest in every country in the world. For more information, please visit worldbank.org/poverty-and-shared-prosperity.Publication Impact Evaluation in Practice, First Edition(World Bank, 2011)The Impact Evaluation in Practice handbook is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to impact evaluation for policymakers and development practitioners. The book incorporates real-world examples to present practical guidelines for designing and implementing evaluations. Readers will gain an understanding of the uses of impact evaluation and the best ways to use evaluations to design policies and programs that are based on evidence of what works most effectively. The handbook is divided into three sections: Part One discusses what to evaluate and why; Part Two outlines the theoretical underpinnings of impact evaluation; and Part Three examines how to implement an evaluation. Case studies illustrate different methods for carrying out impact evaluations.