Critical Perspectives on Schooling and Fertility in the Developing World (1999) / Chapter Skim
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6 Fertility, Education, and Resources in South Africa
6 Fertility, Education, and Resources in South Africa
Pages 138-180
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From page 138... ...
Using recently collected household survey data, this chapter examines an important consideration in the design of that policy: the relationship between fertility and resources, with a focus on the role played by maternal education. A vast number of studies have demonstrated that education and fertility tend to be negatively correlated in a wide array of contexts.
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From page 139... ...
To the extent that it can be tested with the available data, this interpretation does not appear to tell the entire story in South Africa. While household resources do affect fertility outcomes, even after controlling for spousal characteristics, household income, labor market choices, and community characteristics, female education continues to have a powerful negative association with fertility.
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From page 140... ...
and the annual October Household Surveys are good examples. The 1994 October Household Survey estimates South Africa's population at about 40 million, of whom over three-quarters are black; half the rest are white, nearly 9 percent are mixed-race coloreds, and fewer than 3 percent are Asians, mostly of Indian descent.
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From page 141... ...
DUNCAN THOMAS 7 5 4 . ~0 4J ° 2 1 1 o 12 11 10 9 _ 8 6 4 3 1 O Total fertility rate ~ 1 50 55 60 65 70 75 Year '% ~ \ red ` -- - Tnd~ =4 White l BO 8590 Education Indiar 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 Birth year FIGURE 6-1 Total fertility rates and education of females, South Africa, 1950-1990.
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From page 142... ...
Evidence for this conclusion is provided by data from the PSLSD indicating that there is a family planning clinic in the community for over three-quarters of Indian women aged 15 to 49, about half of colored women, but only one-third of black women.2 2These discrepancies are likely to be underestimates of differences in service availability for at least two reasons. First, many women in South Africa obtain family planning services from places other than family planning clinics, and blacks are the least likely to use alternative sources.
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From page 143... ...
This inequality is reflected, for example, in differences in education as depicted in the lower panel of Figure 6-1, which displays mean educational attainment for women, by birth cohort, as reported in the 1993 PSLSD.3 Among women born in 1935, whites are much better educated than coloreds, Indians, and blacks: the average white woman had completed 9 years of schooling, whereas the average black had completed less than 2. The educational attainment of all groups except whites especially Indians and, to a lesser extent, blacks has increased substantially since then.
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From page 144... ...
Regressions in the upper panel of Table 6-1 report the impact of maternal and paternal years of schooling on the completed years of education of adult children aged 20 to 70 at the time of the survey. Parental education is a powerful predictor of own education: fully 26 percent of the variation in educational attainment among blacks is explained by parental education alone.
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From page 145... ...
To provide some evidence on that question, one can examine the effects of parental education and resources on the educational attainment of children still resident at home using data from the PSLSD.6 An advantage of these data is that they contain information on household per capita expenditures, a longer-run measure of resources available to the family; the disadvantage is that one is forced to restrict attention to only those children who are still resident in the 5The regressions include controls for whether the respondent was born in an urban, pert-urban, or squatter area, along with town-of-birth fixed effects. Paternal occupation is not, therefore, simply proxying for rural-urban differences.
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From page 147... ...
147 V, ED ca ;^ · ~ ;^ V, v ¢ m mu v v ¢ 0 ~ 0 0 .
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From page 148... ...
In 1975, for example, the year before the Soweto school riots, public expenditures on education of the average white school-age child were more than 15 times greater than expenditures on the average black child. RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FERTILITY AND EDUCATION Having shown that parental education and, for blacks, family and community resources play an important role in determining the educational attainment of the next generation, the discussion now turns to the correlation between education and fertility.
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From page 149... ...
DUNCAN THOMAS TABLE 6-2 Means and [Standard Errors] 149 CharacteristicBlackBlackColoredIndianWhite Lit.
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From page 150... ...
The 1994 October Household Survey reports a birth history for each female respondent; among those aged 40 to 49, the fertility rates of whites and Indians are remarkably close to those reported in the PSLSD. (For whites, completed fertility is 2.39 in the October Household Survey and 2.50 in the PSLSD.
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From page 151... ...
Moreover, fully one-third of black women did not complete primary school, and among those who attended secondary school, only 12 percent completed metric (Stan 8There is, for example, anecdotal evidence of enumerators in the 1980s lecturing respondents about the virtues of small family sizes.
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From page 152... ...
. Indians and whites, however, display different patterns: only about 15 percent had not completed primary school, while more than one-third of Indians and more than half of white women had completed metric.
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From page 153... ...
4 3 o 1 D > O) 4 L ., 3 2 O Black 1 ~, ~, \ , i, 11 1 1 1'' 1 1 Indian 0~ Ml I ~ I , \ _~0 1 \ 1 \ ~Q , /~ ~ 1 1 1 1 1 0 2 4 5 6 8 10 12 14 Years of education FIGURE 6-2 Children ever born and female education.
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From page 154... ...
Because the excluded education category is zero years, the coefficients should be interpreted as the impact of that level of schooling relative to not having attended school. For example, black women who completed Standard 5 had 0.59 children fewer than those who reported no schooling; those who had completed Standard 10 had 1.27 fewer children.
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From page 155... ...
Among black women, reported in the first two columns, the same pattern emerges. Only 5 percent of women reported more than Standard 8 schooling, so we focus on completion of primary school.
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From page 156... ...
[0.000] R2 0.103 0.057 0.164 0.139 0.140 Sample size 1,377 852 191 85 300 much more like the Standard 4 women than do those who had exited at Standard 5, and it is only those who had completed Standard 8 who reported fewer children than the Standard 5 women.
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From page 157... ...
and that primary school graduates are more likely to use contraceptives than those who 9Evaluating these interpretations of education in the context of fertility rather than wages has an important additional advantage: wages are earned only by those who are working in the labor market, and that choice needs to be taken into account in the estimation. Unfortunately, there are no good instruments for measuring labor market participation in the PSLSD.
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From page 158... ...
Among women with more than 5 years of schooling, there is a powerful negative association between education and fertility: each year of education is associated with around 0.17 fewer children, which is larger in magnitude than the decline among similar black women. The fertility of Indian women also increases until around the completion of primary school and then falls dramatically (at about the same rate as that among coloreds)
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From page 159... ...
.ll Thus the inclusion of spousal characteristics in the fertility regression is associated with a decline of about one-third in the estimated effects of female education, and this decline is essentially constant across the entire education distribution. The estimated spousal education effects in Table 6-5B indicate that around the time of completion of primary school, husband's education has a larger depressing effect on fertility than does wife's education.
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From page 160... ...
160 FERTILITY,EDUCATION,ANDR:ESOURCESINSOUTHAFRICA TABLE 6-5A Children Ever Born, Female Education, and Household and Community Resources, Black Women Aged 15-49 Add Household Include Add Income Add Community Spouse Wages Fixed Baseline Characteristics OLS IV and LFP Effects (1)
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From page 161... ...
The relative importance of male and female education reverses for those who attended secondary school, with the effect of husband's education being smaller (0.061 per year) and that of wife's education being larger (0.089 per year)
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From page 162... ...
This finding is often attributed to the fact that men tend to bear less of the time burden associated with childrearing. If men spend no time on child care and if women' s leisure time is weakly separable from that of their husbands, then male education will have only an income effect on fertility.
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From page 163... ...
household income is added to the regression. The male and female education effects are only slightly reduced (by less than 10 percent)
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From page 164... ...
There are two reasons for concluding that this result is due to measurement error in household income that is correlated with income. First, nonlinear instrumental variables estimates indicate that the income effects are negative throughout the income distribution, and most negative at the top of the 13The instruments are ownership of a bicycle, radio, television, telephone, refrigerator, electric stove, and primus (gas)
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From page 165... ...
Working spouses also tend to be associated with fewer children, but conditional on the spouse's working and his education, higher wages are associated with more children. This association might be interpreted as a pure income effect.l4 The coefficients on maternal education are very close to those in the third column of Tables 6-5A and 6-5B.
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From page 166... ...
In the context of a static model, it may be argued that both are valid instruments. By their nature, however, fertility and labor supply choices demand a dynamic modeling framework: current fertility is the cumulation of choices from adolescence, and there is evidence of substantial state dependence and serial correlation in labor market choices.
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From page 167... ...
This result suggests that community services may play a role in affecting fertility outcomes, although identification of the critical services involved is not possible with the available data. In contrast with income and male employment, the estimated roles of male and female education in the fertility function are remarkably robust to the inclusion of community fixed effects.
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From page 168... ...
household income, is associated with higher fertility, indicating that community resources do not benefit everyone equally. After controlling for community-level income, household income has no effect on fertility, the estimated education effects are very similar to those in column 6 of Tables 6-5A and 6-5B, and both the mean and standard deviation of education in the community are unrelated to fertility.l7 These results raise an important question regarding the ability to separate out the impacts of community characteristics and local income on demographic outcomes.
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From page 169... ...
In sum, education of both men and women has a powerful association with fertility outcomes in South Africa. Among blacks, household resources, labor market factors, and community characteristics are significant determinants of fertility, but only a relatively small portion of the association between female education and family size can be attributed to those factors.
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From page 170... ...
The correlation between education and fertility is stronger among women in the LAM subsample and, as is apparent from column 2 of Table 6-6, so are income effects. Within this subsample, the inclusion of raw test scores has a substantial
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From page 171... ...
171 o ca ~ ca C)
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From page 172... ...
More directly, in a regression of (log) wages on age, education, and test scores among black women, it is computational skills that appear to be rewarded in the labor market: an additional correct answer to the computational questions is associated with a 15 percent higher wage (t statistic is 2.5)
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From page 173... ...
There is suggestive evidence from aggregate data on the timing of fertility declines in South Africa that greater access to family planning services may have been associated with lower fertility. Evidence from the PSLSD demonstrates that community characteristics do indeed affect fertility outcomes, although the impact apparently varies within communities.
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From page 174... ...
A small part of the correlation can be attributed to the role of family and community resources, a larger part to the role of husband's schooling, and part to the acquisition of cognitive skills. An indeterminate fraction of the correlation is associated with unobserved heterogeneity, reflecting the fact that educational attainment is ultimately a choice made by individuals.
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From page 175... ...
Lotter, eds., South Africa's Demographic Future: Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council. Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development 1994 South Africans Rich and Poor: Baseline Household Statistics.
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From page 176... ...
Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council. (mimeographed)
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From page 177... ...
DUNCAN THOMAS APPENDIX A SALDRU, UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN Project for Living Standards and Development LITERACY ASSESSMENT MODULE [LAM] Section A: Listening, Comprehension, and Practical Math (about 5 minutes)
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From page 178... ...
The son, named Philemon, was 16. His secondary school had been closed for many days over the past 6 months.
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From page 179... ...
DUNCAN THOMAS 179 Q4b. What kind of job did Philemon's mother hope he would find?
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From page 180... ...
180 FERTILITY,EDUCATION,ANDRESOURCESINSOUTHAFRICA Section E: Spoken Languages and General Reading Question 11: What language do you speak?
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