The economic rationality of high fertility: An investigation illustrated with Nigerian survey data

Summary

In much of the developing world, especially among rural populations who usually are the majority, field researchers find that fertility is high and fairly stable and that there is little evidence either that high-fertility parents are relatively economically disadvantaged or that they believe themselves to be so. On the other hand most of modern economic-demographic theory suggests that the members of large families should be worse off than the members of small families. It is argued that the ‘hardest’ data are those of high fertility and the relative well being of large families and that the proper social scientific approach should have been to base further investigation upon such findings. It is suggested that much of the economic theorizing has erred because of bad survey data and ethnocentric bias in the research. Data are analysed from research programmes in Ghana and Nigeria to show that high fertility is not as disadvantageous as is often suggested. The main source of evidence is Project 2 of the Nigerian segment of the Changing African Family Project, a 1973 sample survey of 1,499 females and 1,497 males, Yoruba and over 17 years of age, in the Western and Lagos States of Nigeria. It is concluded that the economic ends of a society are largely determined by its social ends and that the economic rationality of high fertility can be determined only within the context of a society's structure and ends. There can be no such thing as a purely economic theory of fertility. It is also concluded that the society studied is moving towards a condition where high fertility will be increasingly disadvantageous and that this is being brought about more by Westernization than modernization.