Pierluigi Conzo, University of Turin
Sintesi
Questo articolo sintetizza i risultati principali di uno studio sulla fecondità e la felicità nell’ Etiopia rurale condotto da P. Conzo (Università di Torino), G. Fuochi (Università di Padova) e L. Mencarini (Università Bocconi) e pubblicato sulla rivista scientifica “Demography”. I risultatisuggerisconoche, al netto delle condizioni di povertà soggettive ed oggettive, in Etiopia rurale avere molti figli genera una condizione di felicità percepita. Tuttavia questo risultato è confermato solo per gli uomini in età avanzata, mentre per le donne - cui spetta il fardello della gravidanza, del parto e della cura dei figli – l’effetto va in direzione opposta. Per le donne la nascita di un nuovo figlio comporta una riduzione del benessere soggettivo, un “costo” cioè per una scelta di investimento di cui beneficerà in futuro solo il marito. Questo studio offre quindi una spiegazione al perché i tassi di fecondità sono ancora elevati in Etiopia rurale (e in generale in Africa Subsahariana), un tema centrale per attivare processi di sviluppo basati sull’espansione di programmi di welfare, miglioramenti delle strutture sanitarie e promozione del ruolo decisionale della donna, segnando un graduale passaggio da quantità a “qualità” (istruzione e salute) dei figli.
Despite a general decline across the world, fertility remains very high in Sub-Saharan African countries, where it is above the replacement level and correlates to high poverty. There are several explanations to why parents still have so many children. One recurrent argument focuses on adults' perceived benefits from having children. The traditional economic theory of fertility, the Value of Children approach and the Intergenerational Wealth Flows go in this direction. They explain high fertility by recognizing that children are perceived as a value because they are a source of labor and support especially in old age.
In addition to their tangible values, children also bring about intangible values to parents, such as emotional rewards, psychological appreciation, adherence to local cultural norms prescribing a large family size. This feature has spurred a series of studies where the potential gain from childbearing is measured through reported life satisfaction, besides evaluating the costs and benefits of children in terms of economic outcomes. This line of studying fertility behavior, however, concerns predominantly developed countries and to a much lesser extent developing countries, in part because high quality panel surveys are not available as they are for developed countries. The picture is further complicated by the uneven bargaining power between partners when it comes to fertility behavior. Fathers may be the ones perceiving – and reaping – the benefits of grown-up children as suggested by different theories.
Drawing on this background, the study I conducted with G. Fuochi (University of Padua) and L. Mencarini (Bocconi University), titled “Fertility and Life Satisfaction in Rural Ethiopia” and published in Demography (54[4]: 1331–1351), aims at establishing how much parents benefit from children in terms of life satisfaction in rural Ethiopia. First, we ask whether fertility affects how satisfied residents of a poor, rural environment are in general with their life. Second, we assess the extent this relationship varies by gender and across different life stages.
The context plays an important role in this study. According to the World Bank data, the rural population over the period 2011-2015 corresponded to 80-82% of the total population in Ethiopia, overall the second-most populous African country (almost 100 million in 2015) and with the highest population growth in the world (with a yearly rate of 2.5 percent in 2014, World Bank data). With a Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of 5.5 children per woman in 2011 and 6.0 in 2005, rural Ethiopia is a perfect case study for our analysis. In 2011 the difference between the total fertility rate in rural and urban Ethiopia was substantial (5.5 children per woman on average vs. 2.6) and the same difference held for contraceptive use among married women (23.4% in rural Ethiopia vs. 52.5% in urban Ethiopia). Rural Ethiopia is characterized by extremely weak social security schemes, cultural norms dictating a large family size, patrilineal formal and informal institutions, poor knowledge about contraception and low uptake, and very limited household bargaining power of women, who also report a mismatch between desired and observed fertility.
On the basis of the aforementioned theories and facts, we have hypothesized that in rural Ethiopia fertility plays a major role in the parents’ subjective well-being, although with differences by gender and across life stages. Specifically, we expected a large family size to be related to greater well-being of older parents, while childbirth events would not generate an immediate positive effect. We expected gender effects, with the total number of children affecting positively men’s, but not women’s, subjective well-being. By exploiting the two most recent waves of the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey (ERHS) we tested these hypotheses separately for men and women, for different age groups, and analyzing how the number of children ever born and new births events relate to life satisfaction of the parents.
Our results show a positive relationship between the number of children ever born and life satisfaction of men aged between 50 and 60 years. Moreover, having had at least a new child in the five years before the interview negatively impacts life satisfaction of women in reproductive age. These effects persist even if we control for objective and subjective poverty indicators and other socio-economic controls. In other words, having a child worsens subjective well-being of younger parents, while the effect is reversed for older parents.
Importantly, despite a large number of children associates with high poverty, the life satisfaction of the fathers increases in the number of children. Subjective well-being in this sense portrays the multidimensional value of children, besides their objective influence on the economic sphere. Our findings suggest that Ethiopian parents perceive the cost of having a child as compensated by long-run benefits of different types, for instance labor assistance in agriculture, uncertainty reduction, old-age support and social status. Our gender-specific results, however, highlight that only men consider children as a valuable investment in a life-cycle perspective, while women mainly bear the costs of childbirths, including the physical risk associated with pregnancy and delivery. The latter is particularly relevant in Ethiopia, which is still striving to improve maternal health, the most problematic among the eight Millennium Development Goals for this country. In fact, Ethiopia has the lowest proportion of births attended by skilled healthcare personnel among all the African countries. These different implications of childbearing for men and women are consistent with women’s preference for less children compared to men, which in turn is reflected by Ethiopian women’s unmet need for contraception (27.5% women in rural Ethiopia 2011 and 34% in total Ethiopia in 2005, according to Ethiopian DHS data).
Given the adverse effect of childbirth on women’s well-being, it is not surprising that women tend to prefer fewer children than men. Yet birth rates per woman are still high in rural Ethiopia! Societal characteristics may explain this puzzle. In a context where men enjoy high household bargaining power, due to cultural traditions, gendered societal institutions, larger relative wealth and customary rules on divorce settlement, having a(nother) child is likely to be driven by men’s preferences. Moreover, conformity to social norms on ideal family size contributes to explain individual fertility decisions, as male Ethiopian household heads give value to a large number of children, culturally recognized as a source of high social status.
Concluding, as long as local traditions endorse large family size and men attribute high instrumental and immaterial value to their grown-up children, combined with the fact that the use of contraception is typically decided by husbands, fertility rates are not likely to decrease very soon in rural Ethiopia. This poses serious obstacles to the development process since having many children (quantity) adversely affect parental investment in human capital (quality), which in turn locks the household in the education-poverty trap.
Our findings suggest that addressing the issue of high fertility means a massive change in fathers’ attitudes toward childbearing and an improvement in women’s conditions in terms of schooling, job participation and partnership quality, as these three characteristics are associated with a preference for less children. At the same time, female empowerment might help to balance the bargaining power on fertility decision within the family, since – in the current situation – women’s preferences for a lower number of children are obscured by those of their husbands.
Finally, in contexts where old-age support is better provided by children than by institutions, high fertility may appear an optimal strategy for parents’ well-being in a life-cycle perspective. Therefore, at the government level, strengthening and expanding the social security system could mitigate the fathers’ need for children as old-age insurance providers, and hence easy the quality vs. quantity of children tradeoff. Providing easier access to formal health care services would also improve the woman’s subjective well-being after the birth of a child.
