Over recent decades, most developed countries have experienced a fall in fertility and an increase in longevity which have led to a significant increase in the weight of elderly on the population and a decrease in the number of working-age people per elderly population. Economists and politicians are concerned about the aging population process and the need to introduce policy reforms such as f...

Although the incidence of congenital heart disease (CHD) is similar worldwide, the burden of supporting these patients falls more heavily on countries with high fertility rates. In a country with a fertility rate of about eight per woman, the population has to support four times as many children with CHD as in a country with a fertility rate of two. Countries with the highest fertility rates te...

Despite implications for both humans and the environment, a scant body of research examines fertility in forest frontiers. This study examines the fertility– environment association using empirical data from Ecuadorian Amazon between 1980 and 1999. Fertility dramatically declined during this period, and our empirical models suggest that households’ relationship to land partially explains this d...

When twinning rates are studied, maternal age and parity should be considered. Data on parity are seldom available. We studied information about the mean parity, using the gross reproduction rate, the total fertility rate and the crude birth rate. These are strongly correlated with the mean parity. The crude birth rate is more readily available than the gross reproduction rate or the total fert...

This paper investigates the relationship between per capita human capital investment and the fertility rate. In the first part of the article we analyze a theoretical model with endogenous birth rate in which we do not make any assumption on how fertility directly affects per capita human capital accumulation. The results obtained in this model are then compared with those of a more traditional...