Impact of fertility on objective and subjective poverty in Malawi

Abstract

The paper uses data from the Second Malawi Integrated Household Survey to investigate the impact of fertility on poverty in rural Malawi. We use two measures of poverty: the objective and the subjective. After accounting for endogeneity of fertility by using son preference as an instrumental variable, we find that fertility increases the probability of being objectively poor. This effect is robust to the choice of the poverty line used. It is also robust to accounting for economies of scale, and household composition as well as to measuring poverty using continuous welfare indicators. We also find that when fertility is treated as an exogenous variable its impact is underestimated. When poverty is measured subjectively, the results are opposite to those of objective poverty. We find that fertility lowers the likelihood of feeling poor.