Opinion – Michael França: Fertility is one of the first steps towards development

In the 1960s, Gary Becker, Nobel Prize in Economics, and other researchers popularized a theoretical model for thinking about the interaction over time between fertility and economic advances.

The idea behind the approach is simple. Returns to education tend to rise as countries grow. As a result, families have fewer children and seek to invest more in their education. They choose to decrease the quantity while improving the “quality” of their offspring.

Economic growth also tends to increase female participation in the labor market. The cost of time increases, thus raising more questions about whether to use it to start a family or focus on career development.

Taking care of children becomes something more and more expensive. This context means that many people with a higher level of education and income start to have fewer descendants than they would like. Many postpone the decision to have children or simply do not have them.

This scenario is quite different at the other end of the income distribution. Poor and less educated women tend to experience motherhood relatively young and end up having, on average, more children than those with more education.

Each additional child born into a low-income environment tends to negatively affect the likelihood that all family members will achieve better living conditions. In addition, demand increases for government spending on policies that, in many cases, will alleviate poverty but will be ineffective in generating social mobility.

In this context, there is a set of measures that could be adopted to reverse this process that accentuates intergenerational inequalities. In the case of more educated women, the economy will prosper if public managers contribute so that they can combine career and family. For this, social norms and policies need to progress.

In recent years, women began to have more children in those countries where men began to assume greater responsibilities in the care of children and there was an expansion of policies to support families.

With regard to the poorest, it is necessary to expand the supply of modern contraceptive methods and move forward in reducing bureaucracy in access to vasectomy and tubal ligation. In the case of Brazil, a country marked by unwanted pregnancies, especially among young and disadvantaged women, it is not uncommon for those who had other children while they were trying to become apt to undergo tubal ligation.

Advancing education in peripheral places also has an impact on fertility. Several empirical studies attest to this. Attending a quality school represents a way for poor students to discover possibilities that many parents from disadvantaged backgrounds did not imagine for their children.

Before the new government, several proposals and policies will be discussed. However, one should not forget that many families with good socioeconomic conditions are having fewer children than they would like, while those who are more vulnerable end up generating a high number of unwanted pregnancies.

Changing the reproductive profile of society means changing the composition of the population over time. It is one of the first steps for more Brazilians to be born in minimally favorable conditions for the development of their potential.

The text is a tribute to the song “Maria, Maria”, by Fernando Brant and Milton Nascimento.