Abstract
This paper examines the dynamic effects of pandemic crises on fertility rates for a large, unbalanced sample of 182 developed and develo** countries during the period 1996–2019. We find that major pandemics are associated with significant and persistent declines in fertility rates of about 2%, on average. These effects are significantly larger for pandemics characterized by a very large number of confirmed cases relative to the population (up to 6½%) and by deep recessions (up to 5%). In addition, the effects are larger in advanced economies (up to 5%) and for younger women, on average.
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Data availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.
Notes
Data for fertility are taken from https://www.humanfertility.org/Data/STFF and covers monthly fertility rates for 23 economies from January 2020 to May 2022 (see Table A1). We use data from the Oxford’s COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) for containment measures. OxCGRT collects information on government policy responses across eight dimensions, namely: (i) school closures, (ii) workplace closures, (iii) public event cancellations, (iv) gathering restrictions, (v) public transportation closures, (vi) stay-at-home orders, (vii) restrictions on internal movement, and (viii) international travel bans. The database scores the stringency of each measure ordinally, for example, depending on whether the measure is a recommendation or a requirement, and whether it is targeted or nation-wide. We normalize each measure to range between 0 and 1 to make them comparable. In addition, we compute and aggregate a Stringency Index as the average of the sub-indices, again normalized to range between 0 and 1. The data start on January 1, 2020.
The total fertility represents the number of children born to a woman if she were to live to the end of her childbearing years and bear children according to age-specific fertility rates of the specified year. The total fertility rate denotes the number of children per woman.
The index of economic globalization captures de facto trade and financial globalization, of which each gets a weight of 50%. The overall KOF Globalization Index is calculated as the average of the de facto and the de jure Globalization Index.
As we show later, the results are robust to alternative lag structures.
\(F\left({z}_{it}\right)\) = 0.5 is the cutoff between relatively mild and strong recession. The approach is similar to considering a dummy variable that takes value 1 when the growth is below that of the average pandemic recession—that is, \(F\left({z}_{it}\right)\) > = 0.5, and zero otherwise. The difference is that instead of considering two discrete values (0 and 1), the smooth transition approaches allow the regimes to continuously vary between 0 and 1 and therefore allows to estimate the impulse functions more precisely.
As we show later, the results are robust to alternative values of the parameter \(\gamma\).
The finite sample bias is in the order of 1/T, where T in our sample is 24.
These GMM results should be treated with cautions since the Hansen J-test of over-identifying restrictions rejects the null hypothesis of the validity of the full set of orthogonality conditions.
The results hardly change when using alternative values of the parameter \(\gamma\), between 1 and 6 (Fig. A13).
Such findings are in line with Abiona and Ajefu (2023) who found a key role of access to healthcare services during pregnancy in cushioning the adverse effects of drought shocks on fertility rates in Sierra Leone.
Note that in this exercise, we set the pandemic recession dummy defined in Eq. (2) to zero for the other pandemics and other countries not affected by the Zika. Therefore, the fertility effects of Zika (and H1N1) reported in Fig. 7 should not be interpreted as the overall average effects of these two pandemics.
The classification of countries in advanced and non-advanced economies is based on the IMF World Economic Outlook.
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Acknowledgements
Davide Furceri and Pietro Pizzuto acknowledge the University of Palermo for the FFR2023. The authors would like to thank the Editor Klaus F. Zimmermann, three anonymous referees, and participants at the 27th International Conference on Macroeconomic Analysis and International Finance–ICMAIF for useful comments and suggestions.
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Furceri, D., Pizzuto, P. & Yarveisi, K. The effect of pandemic crises on fertility. J Popul Econ 37, 3 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-024-00983-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-024-00983-3