Demographic change,human capital accumulation and R&D‐based growth

Employing an overlapping generations model of R&D‐based growth with endogenous fertility and education decisions, we examine how demographic changes induced by an increase in life expectancy influence the long‐run growth rate of the economy. We demonstrate that life expectancy, when relatively low (high), positively (negatively) affects economic growth. This paper also compares the growth implications of child education subsidy policies (i.e., policies for enhancing basic education) and child rearing subsidy policies (i.e., pro‐natal policies) and demonstrate that while the child education subsidies consistently foster economic growth, child rearing subsidies may negatively affect economic growth.     

School Education,Learning‐by‐Doing,and Fertility in Economic Development

We examine the policy implications of relaxing constraints on the educational choice of individuals for economic development. Distinguishing human capital accumulation through schooling and through learning‐by‐doing and knowledge spillovers, we show that in the earlier stages of development, mitigating and eventually eliminating constraints on school education would be necessary for even further economic development. Expanded school education increases the income of individuals and encourages physical capital accumulation, which enlarges productive knowledge through implementation and operations. The increased labor productivity thus boosts economic growth. In the process, the fertility rate will decline because of the increased education cost per child.     

PUBLIC EDUCATION, FERTILITY INCENTIVES, NEOCLASSICAL ECONOMIC GROWTH AND WELFARE

Using a simple overlapping generations model of neoclassical growth, we analyse the effects of both child allowances and the system of public education on the rate of fertility, the per capita income and the individual lifetime welfare. The essential message of the present paper is that developed countries plagued by below-replacement fertility and income stagnation may raise per capita income and the rate of fertility at the same time by increasing the public education expenditure rather than by resorting to child allowances. The latter, in fact, are found to be harmful for long-run neoclassical economic growth and, in contrast with the common belief, for the rate of population growth as well. Moreover, welfare analysis has shown the existence of a Pareto-efficient welfare-maximizing educational contribution rate.     

SOCIAL STATUS,EDUCATION AND GOVERNMENT SPENDING IN A TWO‐SECTOR MODEL OF ENDOGENOUS GROWTH*

This paper extends the relative wealth specification of status preference to the two‐sector Uzawa (1965 )– Lucas (1988 ) model and examines the effectiveness of government spending on economic growth. It is found that the desire for relative wealth‐induced social status and/or the education component of relative wealth‐induced social status are important ingredients in determining the growth rate effects of government spending. Provided that the agent is concerned with his or her relative social position, the education‐induced social status plays a more important role than the physical‐asset‐induced social status in determining the validity of public spending on growth. If individuals do not care about their education‐driven social rewards, then an increase in government spending has no effect on the balanced growth rate regardless of the presence of the physical‐asset‐induced social status. A rise in government spending reduces the long‐run growth rate if the education‐induced social status is present.     

Pro‐social leadership under authoritarianism

Authoritarianism is regarded as being unaccountable for people's needs, but few studies have documented how authoritarian countries balance their policy goals. China is known to use a promotion system to incentivize local leaders to develop the economy, while neglecting social spending. This paper documents that more leaders having a liberal arts background have been promoted as top provincial leaders. After carefully ruling out other channels, we provide evidence that the shift of top provincial leaders’ college educational backgrounds from science/technology to liberal arts/social science has increased fiscal expenditure shares on science, education, culture and public health and cut economic construction expenditures accordingly. The finding is mainly driven by the post‐1994 period, when local leaders had stronger incentives for economic growth. This indicates that Chinese top authorities are promoting more pro‐social local leaders when providing pro‐growth incentives in general.     

Life expectancy and economic development: Evidence from microdata

This study examines the effect of life expectancy on fertility, education, and labor force participation. Using birth and sibling histories from the Demographic Health Surveys conducted in sub‐Saharan Africa, I construct a time series of age‐specific birth rates and mortality rates at the country‐region level. I use these data to test the implications of a general equilibrium model linking life expectancy to fertility, human capital, and labor supply. My results suggest that increases in life expectancy reduce fertility, increase education, and increase labor force participation. Overall, my empirical results suggest that in sub‐Saharan Africa, increases in life expectancy will have a positive impact on growth through fertility, education, and labor supply but that the effect will be small. My results also rule out the possibility that recent shocks to adult mortality in high HIV prevalence countries will reduce fertility, increase labor productivity, and lead to faster growth.     

Fertility,Female Labor Supply,and Family Policy

The present paper develops an overlapping generations general equilibrium model for Germany in order to study the impact of public policy on household labor supply and fertility decisions. Starting from a benchmark equilibrium which reflects the current German family policy regime we introduce various reforms of the tax and child benefit system and quantify the consequences for birth rates and female labor supply. Our simulations indicate three central results: First, higher transfers to families (either direct, in‐kind or via family splitting) may increase birth rates significantly, but they may come at the cost of lower female employment. Second, the introduction of individual taxation (instead of joint taxation of couples) would increase female employment but might further reduce current birth rates in Germany. Third, it is possible to increase birth rates and female employment rates simultaneously if the government invests in child care facilities for children of all ages.     

Demographic Transition and Fertility Rebound in Economic Development*

Recent evidence on the “fertility rebound” offers credence to the idea that, from the onset of early industrialization to the present day, the dynamics of fertility can be represented by an N-shaped curve. An overlapping generations model with parental investment in human capital can account for these observed movements in fertility rates during the different stages of demographic change. A demographic transition with declining fertility emerges at the intermediate stage, when parents engage on a child quantity–quality trade-off. At later stages, however, the process of economic growth generates sufficient resources so that households can rear more children while still providing the desirable amount of education investment per child.     

UNCERTAIN INFANT MORTALITY,LEARNING, AND LIFE‐CYCLE FERTILITY*

This article examines the links between infant mortality and fertility in an environment with unobserved heterogeneity in infant mortality risk across mothers. In such an environment, replacement behavior (i.e., the fertility response to an experienced child death) might be influenced by mothers' learning about a family‐specific component of infant mortality risk. I explicitly introduce learning by mothers in a dynamic stochastic model of life‐cycle marital fertility, and I estimate the model's structural parameters using Malaysian panel data. The framework is used to estimate replacement rates and to correct for birth selectivity in the estimation of the relationship between infant mortality risk and “health inputs.”     

Health spending,savings and fertility in a lifecycle‐dynastic model with longevity externalities

We investigate health spending, savings, fertility and policy implications in a lifecycle‐dynastic model with longevity externalities in annuity returns. We show that such externalities engender not only excessive health spending but also under‐saving and excessive fertility. Social security and health subsidization increase health spending and savings but reduce fertility from laissez‐faire levels. A publicly funded universal health system under labour‐income taxation raises fertility. Taxing health spending or using social security and public health together can obtain socially optimal health spending, savings, longevity and fertility. Numerical results based on US observations suggest substantial variations among these cases, especially in old‐age health spending.     

Functional components of public expenditure,fiscal consolidations,and economic activity

This paper analyses how the functional components of public expenditure and spending‐driven consolidations affect the economic growth, unemployment, and income inequality. A dynamic panel data least squares dummy variable estimator estimator is employed over a sample of 15 European Union countries during the period 1990–2012. The empirical results show that real GDP growth decreases when fiscal austerity measures are implemented, especially if they are spending‐driven. Cuts in public expenditure undermine economic growth, namely if they slash spending on public order, recreation, and education. Spending cuts on education, in particular, affect the investment in human capital, harming not only growth but also economic, social, and human development. The unemployment rate also proved to be significantly boosted when austerity measures restrict spending on education, whereas income inequality rises when social protection expenditures are cut.     

Bounded rationality,expectations, and child labour

This paper develops a model with overlapping generations, where the household's optimal fertility, child labour, and education decisions depend on the parents’ expectations or beliefs about the return to education. It is shown that there exists a range of parental income where the fertility rate is high and children participate in the labour market and receive an incomplete education if a parent believes the return to education is low. The act of participating in the labour market reduces the child's ability to accumulate human capital; thus, the action of sending a child into the labour market is sufficient to ensure that the parents’ initially pessimistic expectations are fulfilled. It is then shown that a one‐time policy intervention, such as banning child labour and mandatory education, can be enough to move a country from the positive child labour equilibrium to an equilibrium with no child labour.     

New Evidence on Intra‐Household Allocation of Resources in Japanese Households

This paper examines intra‐household allocation of resources to gain insight into family relationships and gender bias in Japanese households. We take the Engel curve approach to examine how adult consumption is affected by the presence of a child, either a boy or a girl, in the family. Empowered by diary‐based high quality spending data from the Family Income and Expenditure Survey, our empirical results show that adult consumption is significantly reduced in households with children; furthermore, gender bias is not observed in total adult expenditures, while responses of adult clothing expenses to the presence of a child are significantly different between a boy and a girl: spending on a father's clothing is reduced when the child is a school‐aged daughter, while spending on a mother's clothing decreases when a school‐aged son is in the home. Our analysis also shows that after the early 2000s girls receive a larger share of spending for children's clothing as well as for high school education than boys.     

MILITARY SPENDING,THREATS AND STOCHASTIC GROWTH

This paper analyses the impact of home military spending and foreign military threat on economic growth in a stochastic endogenous growth model involving the supply‐side and demand‐side effects produced by military spending. The paper states that an increase in home military spending affects economic growth through three channels, including the crowding‐out effect, the spin‐off effect, and the resource mobilization effect. The net effect which depends on these three channels is ambiguous. Hence, we demonstrate that there exists an optimal defence burden that maximizes the economic growth rate. Furthermore, the optimal defence burden depends on the degree of risk preference. Namely, the optimal defence burden of the risk‐loving agent is more than that of the risk‐neutral agent, and in turn is more than that of the risk‐averse agent. At the same time, we prove that the relationship between the volatility in military spending and economic growth also depends on the degree of risk preference. In addition, we show that greater volatility in foreign military spending leads to a decrease in home aggregate consumption, and hence speeds up economic growth in the home country.     

INFRASTRUCTURE,PUBLIC EDUCATION AND GROWTH WITH CONGESTION COSTS

This paper studies the implications of education quality for the optimal allocation of public expenditure in a simple endogenous growth model with mandatory schooling and infrastructure spillovers. Education quality is inversely related to the degree of congestion in schools, which is itself measured in two ways: the proportions of teachers and students in the population, and the ratio of government spending on education to teaching capacity. The balanced‐growth path is derived and the transitional dynamics associated with an increase in the degree of congestion are analysed. The growth‐maximizing share of government spending on education is shown to depend negatively on the congestion parameter. Policy implications for the ‘quantity versus quality’ debate in schooling are also discussed.     

The trade-off between fertility and education: evidence from before the demographic transition

The trade-off between child quantity and quality is a crucial ingredient of unified growth models that explain the transition from Malthusian stagnation to modern growth. We present first evidence that such a trade-off indeed existed already in the nineteenth century, exploiting a unique census-based dataset of 334 Prussian counties in 1849. Furthermore, we find that causation between fertility and education runs both ways, based on separate instrumental-variable models that instrument fertility by sex ratios and education by landownership inequality and distance to Wittenberg. Education in 1849 also predicts the fertility transition in 1880–1905.     

CONTRACEPTION AND DEVELOPMENT: A UNIFIED GROWTH THEORY

This study investigates the interaction of the use of modern contraceptives, fertility, education, and long‐run growth. It develops an economic model that takes into account that sexual intercourse is utility enhancing and that birth control by modern contraceptives is more efficient but more costly than traditional methods. The study shows how a traditional economy, in which modern contraceptives are not used, gradually converges toward a high growth regime, in which modern contraceptives are used. Lower prices or higher efficacy of contraceptives are conducive to an earlier onset of the fertility transition and a quicker takeoff to modern growth.     

Economic growth,repression, and state expenditure in non-democratic regimes

This paper examines how economic growth affects government spending in non-democracies. A robust finding is that positive growth induces a significant increase in defence spending but a decrease in non-defence spending in dictatorships, with little effect in democracies. Government spending is slightly sensitive to negative growth across regimes. Higher growth rate in a country than its neighbours induces more spending than their average. Corruption causes a reduction in defence spending but an increase in non-defence spending. Primary education stimulates non-defence spending but reduces defence expenditure, secondary education causing the opposite effect. An under-developed country spends less than a developed country.     

Fertility choice,mortality expectations,and interdependent preferences—An empirical analysis

We investigate the empirical relationship between child mortality and fertility across 46 low and middle income countries. Specifically, we model the effect of mortality expectations and interdependent fertility preferences on fertility. The direct marginal effect of mortality expectations on fertility is larger than zero but less than unity. This implies that a decrease in mortality rates leads to a decrease in children born but to an increase in the number of surviving children and hence the rate of population growth. Taking into account interdependent fertility preferences, whereby an individual's fertility choice affects the fertility decisions of others, the marginal effect of mortality expectations on fertility becomes one. Hence, if we allow for both mortality expectations and the amplifying effect of interdependent fertility preferences, a decrease in child mortality has no net effect on the rate of population growth.