Life expectancy and economic development.
详细信息
文摘
I study the relationship between life expectancy and economic development. In particular, I examine the effect of improvements in life expectancy on fertility, education and labor force participation. In chapter 1, I exploit the shock to mortality caused by the Universal Immunization Program in India to study the impact of declining child mortality on fertility and human capital investment decisions of households. Between 1980 and 1990, immunization rates for the main childhood diseases in India increased 50 to 60 percentage points. Using country-level changes in immunization rates interacted with state-level initial mortality in 1980 as an instrument for child mortality changes, I find that a 1 percentage point decline in child mortality reduces births last year by about 5 percent, and increases female schooling by 0.4 years, an increase of about 7 percent. While previous papers have focused on the "horizon effect" where declines in adult mortality increase human capital accumulation, my findings point to another mechanism of the quantity/quality tradeoff that works through child mortality and fertility declines. In chapter 2, using birth and sibling histories from Demographic Health Surveys conducted in sub-Saharan Africa I construct age-specific birth rates and age-specific mortality rates at the country-region level. I use this data to test the implications of a general equilibrium model linking life expectancy to fertility, education, and labor supply. I find that increased life expectancy lowers fertility, but the size of the effect is small. I find no difference between high HIV countries those with greater than 5 percent prevalence) and low HIV countries, ruling out the possibility that fear of infection dramatically lowers fertility. I find a positive relationship between life expectancy and education when I pool all countries. Within high HIV countries, however, the relationship between life expectancy and education is less robust. Finally, I find a weak positive relationship between life expectancy and labor force participation for females, but no relationship among males. Overall the new data suggests that in sub-Saharan Africa, increases in life expectancy will have a positive impact on growth through fertility and education but the effect will be small.