Economists have long been dealing with the puzzle that fertility tends to be negativelyrelated to in come both in time series and cross section. Becker (1960) rejected explanations for this relationship whichassert that children are inferior goods or that high in come families, who spend more on their children, have lower fertility because they face higher prices of children.
He attempted to address the puzzle viathe Quantity-Quality (QQ) model which argues that children are a superior good and recognizes that thedemand for children involves, in addition to the quantitative dimension represented by the number of children, a qualitative dimension associated with thechoice of expenditures per child. He proposed a simple model of fertility behavior in which parents had preferences both for the number ofchildren andthe quality per child.
2One implication of the QQ model is that a smaller family size should foster the development of higherquality children.A large and growing body of empirical research tests the QQ model by estimatingthe relationship between family size and children’s outcomes. Much of the early literature found that larger families reduce child quality, suchas educational attainment while more recent studies from several developed countries, argue that family sizehas no causal effect on children’s outcomes.Given the above,
(a)Discuss the theoretical framework of the QQ model(
b)Explain implications of the QQ model for policy in developing/developed countries.
(c)Evaluate the empirical evidence on QQ mode
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