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Childlessness and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: Is There Evidence for a U-shaped Pattern?
In high-income countries, women increasingly remain permanently childless. Little is known about the relationship between childlessness and socioeconomic development in non-Western societies and particularly sub-Saharan Africa. At lower levels of development, poverty-driven (i.e., involuntary) child...
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Springer Netherlands
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9363553/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35966357 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10680-022-09608-5 |
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author | Verkroost, Florianne C. J. Monden, Christiaan W. S. |
author_facet | Verkroost, Florianne C. J. Monden, Christiaan W. S. |
author_sort | Verkroost, Florianne C. J. |
collection | PubMed |
description | In high-income countries, women increasingly remain permanently childless. Little is known about the relationship between childlessness and socioeconomic development in non-Western societies and particularly sub-Saharan Africa. At lower levels of development, poverty-driven (i.e., involuntary) childlessness may decrease with increases in levels of development, while at higher levels of development opportunity-driven (i.e., voluntary and circumstantial) childlessness may rise with development. Thus, we expect a U-shaped relationship between childlessness and development overall. We examine this idea for sub-Saharan Africa. We further contribute by differentiating between female and male childlessness; and between involuntary, voluntary and circumstantial childlessness. Moreover, we construct new indicators of subnational historical development to assess both inter- and intra-country variation, and distinguish between three components (health, education and income) to investigate the drivers behind the hypothesized U-shaped relationship. Using 291 Demographic and Health Surveys between 1986 and 2018 from 38 countries and 384 regions, we find a U-shaped relationship between female childlessness and development, and a linear relationship for men. The U-shape for women results from negative associations of female involuntary childlessness with health and educational advancements, combined with positive correlations of voluntary and circumstantial childlessness with education and income improvements. While these positive associations are stronger among men than women, the negative relationships of involuntary childlessness with health and education observed for women are absent for men, resulting in an overall positive and linear relationship between development and childlessness among men. Our findings have implications for how we might expect childlessness rates to evolve with future levels of development. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10680-022-09608-5. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9363553 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Springer Netherlands |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-93635532022-08-11 Childlessness and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: Is There Evidence for a U-shaped Pattern? Verkroost, Florianne C. J. Monden, Christiaan W. S. Eur J Popul Article In high-income countries, women increasingly remain permanently childless. Little is known about the relationship between childlessness and socioeconomic development in non-Western societies and particularly sub-Saharan Africa. At lower levels of development, poverty-driven (i.e., involuntary) childlessness may decrease with increases in levels of development, while at higher levels of development opportunity-driven (i.e., voluntary and circumstantial) childlessness may rise with development. Thus, we expect a U-shaped relationship between childlessness and development overall. We examine this idea for sub-Saharan Africa. We further contribute by differentiating between female and male childlessness; and between involuntary, voluntary and circumstantial childlessness. Moreover, we construct new indicators of subnational historical development to assess both inter- and intra-country variation, and distinguish between three components (health, education and income) to investigate the drivers behind the hypothesized U-shaped relationship. Using 291 Demographic and Health Surveys between 1986 and 2018 from 38 countries and 384 regions, we find a U-shaped relationship between female childlessness and development, and a linear relationship for men. The U-shape for women results from negative associations of female involuntary childlessness with health and educational advancements, combined with positive correlations of voluntary and circumstantial childlessness with education and income improvements. While these positive associations are stronger among men than women, the negative relationships of involuntary childlessness with health and education observed for women are absent for men, resulting in an overall positive and linear relationship between development and childlessness among men. Our findings have implications for how we might expect childlessness rates to evolve with future levels of development. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10680-022-09608-5. Springer Netherlands 2022-03-10 /pmc/articles/PMC9363553/ /pubmed/35966357 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10680-022-09608-5 Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . |
spellingShingle | Article Verkroost, Florianne C. J. Monden, Christiaan W. S. Childlessness and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: Is There Evidence for a U-shaped Pattern? |
title | Childlessness and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: Is There Evidence for a U-shaped Pattern? |
title_full | Childlessness and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: Is There Evidence for a U-shaped Pattern? |
title_fullStr | Childlessness and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: Is There Evidence for a U-shaped Pattern? |
title_full_unstemmed | Childlessness and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: Is There Evidence for a U-shaped Pattern? |
title_short | Childlessness and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: Is There Evidence for a U-shaped Pattern? |
title_sort | childlessness and development in sub-saharan africa: is there evidence for a u-shaped pattern? |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9363553/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35966357 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10680-022-09608-5 |
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