The Gender and Generational Consquences of the Demographic Transition and Population Policy: An Assessment of the Micro and Macro Linkages

The demographic transition changes the age composition of a population, affecting resource allocations at the household and aggregate level. If age profiles of income, consumption, savings and investments were stable and estimable for the entire population, they might suggest how the demographic transition would affects inputs to growth. However, existing macro and micro simulations are estimated from unrepresentative samples of wage earners that do not distinguish sex, schooling, etc. The “demographic dividend” is better evaluated through case studies of household surveys and long-run social experiments. Matlab, Bangladesh, extended a family planning and maternal and child health program to half the villages in its district in 1977, and recorded fertility in the program villages was 16 percent lower than in control villages for the following two decades until 1996. Households in program villages realized health and productivity gains that were concentrated among women, while child survival and schooling increased, and household physical assets were 25 percent greater per adult than in control villages.Fertility decline, demographic transition, intergenerational transfers, gender

Productive Benefits of Health: Evidence from Low-Income Countries

Various household survey indicators of adult nutrition and health status are analyzed as determinants of individual wages. However, survey indicators of health status may be heterogeneous, or a combination of health human capital formed by investment behavior and variation due to genotype, random shocks, and measurement error, which are uncontrolled by behavior. Although there are no definitive methods for distinguishing between human capital and genetic variation in health outcomes, alternative mappings of health status, such as height, on community health services, parent socioeconomic characteristics, and ethnic categories may be suggestive. Instrumental variable estimates of health human capital and residual sources of variation in measured health status are included in wage functions to assess empirically whether the productivity of both components of health are equal. Evidence from Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire and Brazil suggests that the health human capital effect on wages is substantially larger than that associated with residual health variation.Health Human Capital, Wage Productivity, Brazil, Ghana, Cote D'Ivoire

Human Resources in China: The Birth Quota, Returns to Schooling, and Migration

Rural elderly have 40% of the income of those in urban areas, spend a larger share of their income on food, are in worse health, work later into their lives, and depend more on their children, lacking pensions and public services. The birth quota since 1980 has particularly restricted the childbearing of rural less educated women, who now faceretirement with fewer children for support. Inequality in China is also be traced to increasing returns to schooling, especially beyond secondary school. Government restrictions on rural-urban migration reduces national efficiency, adds to the urban-rural wage gap, and increases inequality.Human Capital Returns, Rural-Urban Migration, Elderly Poverty, China

Fertility and Income

There is an inverse association between income per adult and fertility among countries, and across households this inverse association is also often observed. Many studies find fertility is lower among better educated women and is often higher among women whose families own more land and assets. What do we know about the social consequences of events and policies that change fertility, if they are independent of parent preferences for children or the economic conditions which account for much of the variation in parent lifetime fertility? These effects of exogenous fertility change on the health and welfare of children can are assessed from Kenyan household survey data by analysis of the consequences of twins, and the effect of avoiding unanticipated fertility appears to have a larger beneficial effect on the body mass index or health status of children in the family than would be expected due to variation in fertility which is accounted for by parent education and household land.Sources of Fertility Decline, Twins, Child Health, Kenya

Wage Gains Associated with Height as a Form of Health Human Capital

Height is consulted as a latent indicator of early nutrition and lifetime health status. Height is observed to increase in recent decades in populations where per capita national income has increased and public health activities have grown. Height is determined by genetic make up and realized in part through satisfactory nutrition and health related care and conditions. Alternative instrumental variables (IV) are explored which proxy price and income constraints which are expected to influence the latter reproducible human capital investments in height. I report OLS and IV estimates of the partial effect of height on log hourly wages in recent national surveys from three countries: Ghana, Brazil and the United States. I conclude that the human capital productivity effect of height estimated by parent education IVs in the US and Ghana are many times larger than the OLS estimates, and in Ghana and Brazil the regional price IVs estimates also imply a substantially larger human capital wage effects of height compared with the OLS estimates. The OLS estimates of height effects on wages are dominated by the genetic variation in height, and appear to understate substantially the human capital returns to health and nutrition inputs which increase adult height.Health, Height, Wages, Human Capital

Human Capital, Schooling and Health Returns

A consensus has been forged in the last decade that recent periods of sustained growth in total factor productivity and reduced poverty are closely associated with improvements in a population's child nutrition, adult health, and schooling, particularly in low-income countries. Estimates of the productive returns from these three forms of human capital investment are nonetheless qualified by a number of limitations in our data and analytical methods. This paper reviews the problems that occupy researchers in this field and summarizes accumulating evidence of empirical regularities. Social experiments must be designed to assess how randomized policy interventions motivate families and individuals to invest in human capital, and then measure the changed wage opportunities of those who have been induced to make these investments.Health, Productivity, Human Capital, Schooling, Returns

Fertility in Developing Countries

The associations between fertility and outcomes in the family and society have been treated as causal, but this is inaccurate if fertility is a choice coordinated by families with other life-cycle decisions, including labour supply of mothers and children, child human capital, and savings. Estimating how exogenous changes in fertility that are uncorrelated with preferences or constraints affect others depends on our specifying a valid instrumental variable for fertility. Twins have served as such an instrument and confirm that the cross-effects of fertility estimated on the basis of this instrument are smaller in absolute value than their associations.Fertility Determination, Malthus,Household Demands, Fertility Effects

Does the Liberalization of Trade Advance Gender Equality in Schooling and Health?

This paper assesses the empirical relationship between the liberalization of international trade and the economic status of women. Although historically globalization is not generally linked to the advancement of women, several recent country studies find export led growth in middle and low income countries is associated with improvements in women’s employment opportunities. Does intercountry empirical evidence confirm this association across a wider range of countries, and suggest the mechanisms by which it operates? Measures of wages for men and women are an unreliable basis for study of gender inequality in many low-income countries, and thus schooling and health are analyzed here as indicators of productivity and welfare and gender gaps. For a sample of 70 countries observed at five year intervals from 1965 to 1980, tariff, quota, and foreign exchange restrictions are found to be inversely associated with trade, and with the levels of education and health, especially for women. Natural resource exports, although providing foreign exchange for imports, appear to reduce investments in schooling and health, and delay the equalization of these human capital investments between men and women. Liberalization of trade policy is consequently linked in the cross section to increased trade, to greater accumulation of human capital, and to increased gender equality.Trade Liberalization, Schooling, Health, Gender Equality

Demographic Determinants of Savings: Estimating and Interpreting the Aggregate Association in Asia

Life cycle savings is proposed as one explanation for much of the increase in savings and economic growth in Asia. The association between the age composition of a nation's population and its savings rate, observed within 16 Asian countries from 1952 to 1992, is re-estimated here to be less than a quarter the size reported in a seminal study, which assumed lagged savings is exogenous. Specification tests as well as common sense imply, moreover, that lagged savings is likely to be endogenous, and when estimated accordingly there remains no significant dependence of savings on the age composition, measured in several ways. Research should consider lifetime savings as a substitute for children, and model the causes for the decline in fertility which changes the age compositions and could thereby account for savings and growth in Asia.Life Cycle Savings, Aging, Asian Growth, Demographic Transition