Socioeconomic equity and fertility in developing countries: A block-recursive model

Summary This paper explores the interrelationships among fertility and three measurable aspects of socioeconomic equity: life expectancy, schooling, and income distribution. A block-recursive model of interaction among these variables is tested on cross-sectional data for developing countries. The structural results validate the initial hypotheses, with an important exception: income distribution does not act directly on fertility. Taking indirect effects into account, by deriving the reduced form of the system, shows life expectancy and schooling as major determinants of fertility, and income distribution as a lesser influence. The feedback from fertility to income equity considerably exceeds the net effect in the other direction.This paper was completed while the author was a visiting scholar at The Carolina Population Center and Department of Economics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Richard Bilsborrow, Boone Turchi, and 7. Richard Udry provided helpful comments on an earlier version. Sang E. Lee and V. Panoutsopoulos kindly made available unpublished data from World Bank files.