Question

What differences can you tell between high- and low-income countries regarding education level and fertility rates?Use Quantity-Quality Tradeoff theory to explain.

Answer 1

Becker and Nigel (1973) suggest that an exogenous rise in the number of children raises the marginal cost of investment in their quality, under the general premise that parents invest in all their children equally. The relationship between family size and child outcomes has been one of the most lasting in economics, guided by the theoretical model of the quantity-quality(Q-Q) trade-off (Becker and Nigel, 1973, 1976; Willis, 1973). The decline, on the one hand, Children's numbers would free up money for investment in human capital; on the other hand, greater family sizes will profit from economies of scale and children's social interaction, as Black et al . ( 2005) concluded, children with less children Siblings may not be better off than in a larger family, if they are.

In developed and developing countries, differences
As shown in Figure ertility rates are higher, and in low-income (developing) countries, educational spending is lower than in high-income (developed) countries. If government education spending is a replacement for private spending, therefore fluctuations in private spending in countries where education is highly subsidised would have a small effect on children's education. Because an important explanation for the quantity-quality trade-off is that an increase in the number of children decreases private education expenditure per child, the quantity-quality trade-off in developing countries would be undermined by strong public education subsidies.

For example, many developed countries provide students from poor families with not only free (obligatory) primary education, but also free school lunches. As a consequence, primary education's direct private costs are practically negligible or even negative.

As a consequence, primary education's direct private costs are practically negligible or even negative. In addition to government subsidies, developed countries appear to have credit markets working better than developing countries, which helps fund their college education for children from large families. Parental wealth and the number of kids would therefore have no direct effect on the education of children. By comparison, even though there are no tuition fees for public primary schools in many developed countries , parents usually have to pay for textbooks, school uniforms, and school lunches, which can be a huge financial burden. It is therefore not surprising that studies using data for developing countries appear to find a substantial trade-off in quantity-quality, although less definitive are the results for studies for developed countries.

The twins were omitted from the study because twins are more likely than singleton children to have lower birth weights and higher mortality rates, which directly influence their educational achievement. Children born after twin births are therefore omitted because, by variables such as birth spacing, their education might be directly influenced by the previous birth of the twins. For example , regular births with short periods between them are linked to low birthweight and small size for gestational age. One research for Brazil found that having an additional child had a major and negative effect on school progression by focusing on the impact on children born before twins (defined as years of schooling divided by age minus six years, where six is the average age at which children begin school)

Besides twin births, the number of children may also be influenced by the gender distribution of earlier-born children.

Many parents want at least one son, and if their earlier-born children are all girls, they prefer to have another child. Getting an additional sibling, whether due to the gender composition of earlier-born children or the birth of twins, has no major effect on their primary school completion or school enrollment for girls aged 12-17 from indigent rural households in Mexico . One potential reason for the various outcomes in Brazil and Mexico is that basic education in Mexico is compulsory through a given level of education (lower secondary school or approximately 17 years of age), while it is compulsory based on age in Brazil (up to 14 years of age or approximately through the second phase of primary school). Parental investment is likely to have a weaker effect on the education of 15-year-old children in Mexico, who are still legally required to attend school, compared to 15-year-old children in Brazil, who are not.

A drawback that all three studies mentioned here share is that they do not regulate the physical endowments of children. As singletons are typically heavier than their twin siblings at birth, if investments in their children are positively associated with the physical endowments of children , parents might invest more in their non-twin children. Only the calculations evaluating singleton results might either underestimate or overestimate the real magnitude of the quantity-quality trade-off depending on whether parental contributions are associated positively or negatively with the endowments of children.

One research compared the estimated effects on singletons and twins with and without adjusting for birthweight to resolve this issue, thus estimating lower and upper limits for the quantity-quality trade-off magnitude.

The study found that parents invested more in their heavier offspring, using the Chinese Child Twins Survey. The study found that an additional child contributed to substantially decreased school growth, lowered planned college attendance, and deteriorated child health after adjusting for birth-endowment effects associated with birthweight. However, while the inclusion of birth weight tends to regulate the effect of infant endowments, since birth weight can be associated with the number of children, it may bring further endogeneity. Having more children or births that are too closely spaced can adversely affect the nutritional intake of the mother and therefore the birth weight of her child.

Although research using data for developing countries appear to support the hypothesis of quantity-quality trade-offs, the evidence is less favourable for developed countries. Combining data from the 1983 and 1995 Israeli population censuses with population registry data, a study found that the number of children in a household had little effect on children.Even when the research focused on a group of individuals of Asian and African descent whose fertility rates are comparable to those in developing countries, this conclusion was drawn. The research also found that the estimated effect of child quantity on child quality was not sensitive to whether the difference in child quantity was due to twin births or earlier-born children's sex composition (parents are more likely to have a third-or more-child if their earlier-born children are all of the same sex). Similar recognition techniques and information on Norwegians aged 16-74 between 1986 and 2000 and who were at least 25 years old in 2000 were used in another study. The study found that the difference in the number of children triggered by twin births did not affect the first-born child's educational attainmentmThese findings are consistent with the results of the Israeli study[ but are inconsistent with the results of studies in developed countries.