Fertility and Life Satisfaction in Rural Ethiopia

Abstract

There is a growing number of studies focusing on the role of fertility in subjective well-being in developed countries while developing countries have been rarely taken into account. We investigate the empirical relationship between fertility and life satisfaction in rural Ethiopia, the largest landlocked country in Africa providing the unique opportunity of panel data availability. Our results suggest that older men benefit the most in terms of life satisfaction from the investment in children, the latter being instead detrimental for women's subjective well being in reproductive age. In particular, consistently with the related socio-economic theories, we find that the number of children ever born plays a positive role for men's life satisfaction in older age. Conversely, a new birth produces the opposite effect especially for young women. We argue that this mismatch has two complementary explanations: on the one hand, rather than a source of (labour) support young children represent a burden which traditionally falls on women's shoulders in the short run; on the other hand, in poor rural areas children can be thought as a valuable long-term investment in a lifecycle perspective. Endogeneity issues are addressed by controlling for lagged life satisfaction in OLS regressions, through fixed effects and the IV approach.3

The Psychological Benefits of Marriage and Children in Rural Malawi

“…Among older Malawians, having more (adult) children is associated with better outcomes across all three psychological measures for older women and greater life satisfaction for older men. These findings differ from the study in rural Ethiopia which found that only older men who had more children experienced heightened life satisfaction (Conzo, Fuochi and Mencarini 2017).…”

“…Despite the value and centrality of children in the lives of Malawians (Dyer 2007), the number of children is not correlated with any measure of men's or women's psychological wellbeing during their reproductive years. This is consistent with our expectations and findings from rural Ethiopia (Conzo, Fuochi and Mencarini 2017), but differs from crosssectional analyses of low-income countries showing a strong negative association between both negative emotions (Deaton and Stone 2014) and life satisfaction (Margolis and Myrskylä 2011).…”

“…This work is at least partly motivated by a desire to gain insights into the retreat from marriage and persistent low fertility that many countries in North America and Europe have experienced over the last few decades. In contrast, only a few studies have investigated the potential psychological implications of marriage and children in low-income countries (Cetre, Clark and Senik 2016;Conzo, Fuochi and Mencarini 2017;Deaton and Stone 2014;Margolis and Myrskylä 2011;Myroniuk 2017;Peiró 2006).…”

“…Moreover, the high-costs of raising children in poor families with limited institutional support may increase parental stress and diminish children's psychological rewards (Aassve, Mencarini and Sironi 2015;Pollman-Schult 2014). Longitudinal research in Africa which focuses on the relationship between adults' psychological well-being and either children (Conzo, Fuochi and Mencarini 2017) or marital status (Myroniuk 2017) is currently rather limited. This paper builds on this small, but growing, body of research in low-income countries by focusing on Malawi, a comparatively poor African country with nearly universal marriage and high-fertility.…”

Is Children The Source of Happiness?

“…Children sex composition may also affect the level of one's happiness [14]. In this study, children's sex composition has a significant effect on men's happiness.…”