Does Economic Growth Reduce Fertility? The Indian Green Revolution Experience.

Andrew Foster, Brown University
Mark R. Rosenzweig, Yale University

A simple economic model is used to structure an empirical analysis of fertility decision-making using a newly available panel data set that constitutes a representative sample of rural India over the period 1971-1999. The results provide strong support for the importance of increases in the value of time of women and of technical change-induced investments in child schooling that accompany economic growth in accounting for fertility decline, with little role for parental schooling. In particular, we find that aggregate wage changes, dominated by increases in the value of female wages, explain 39% of the decline in fertility over the 1982-1999 period. In combination, changes in agricultural productivity and agricultural wage rates explain fully 80% of the decline. In summary, the Indian demographic revolution appears to have in large part resulted from, rather than just accompanied, the green revolution.