ArticleEvolutionary human sciences2020
Disentangling wealth effects on fertility in 64 low- and middle-income countries.
Article in Evolutionary human sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Socioeconomic and Demographic Factors Affecting Age at First Birth Among Tribal Women in India: An NFHS-5 Analysis.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2026Article
- Income and Sex Moderate the Association Between Population Density and Reproduction: A Multilevel Analysis of Life History Strategies Across 23 Nations.Archives of sexual behavior · 2025Article
- Wealth in Couples: Introduction to the Special Issue.European journal of population = Revue europeenne de demographie · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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Abstract
Studies have shown mixed associations between wealth and fertility, a finding that has posed ongoing puzzles for evolutionary theories of human reproduction. However, measures of wealth do not simply capture economic capacity, which is expected to increase fertility. They can also serve as a proxy for market opportunities available to a household, which may reduce fertility. The multifaceted meaning of many wealth measures obscures our ability to draw inferences about the relationship between wealth and fertility. Here, we disentangle economic capacity and market opportunities using wealth measures that do not carry the same market-oriented biases as commonly used asset-based measures. Using measures of agricultural and market-based wealth for 562,324 women across 111,724 sampling clusters from 151 DHS surveys in 64 countries, we employ a latent variable structural equation model to estimate (a) latent variables capturing economic capacity and market opportunity and (b) their effects on completed fertility. Market opportunities had a consistent negative effect on fertility, while economic capacity had a weaker but generally positive effect on fertility. The results show that the confusion between operational measures of wealth and the concepts of economic capacity can impede our understanding of how material resources and market contexts shape reproduction.
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