THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC FACTORS ON FERTILITY FEATURES: A CROSS-COUNTRY ANALYSIS

Abstract

Fertility behavior poses a significant impact on people's lives throughout the world, which has become even more observable especially in the last thirty years. The decision to give birth in a household is influenced by many economic and social variables such as the time cost of the raised child, social structure, the employment status of women and total family income. The aim of our study is to reveal how fertility characteristics are affected by social and economic variables. Our model was applied to three groups in 49 countries within the period of 1990-2018 focusing on the income levels of these countries. The outcomes of the study reveal that fertility characteristics are affected more by economic variables than social variables in all country groups, signifying that a positive increase in economic variables improves the quality of human capital in high-income countries while a positive increase in economic variables in low-income countries increases the number of human capital.