Abstract

This paper aims to assess the disaggregated effects of occupation categories on fertility in Malawi. The interplay between intermediate and proximate determinants of fertility provides variation of fertility levels among women in various occupation categories. A Negative Binomial Regression model is thus applied to the 2015-16 Malawi Demographic and Health Survey (MDHS) data to obtain empirical results. This was followed by the Instrumental Variable and the Two Stage Least Squares (2SLS) regressions to address endogeneity in the model. The findings indicate that women in occupational categories such as professional, technical, managerial, and clerical tend to statistically have fewer logs of expected counts for the total number of children ever born compared to women who are not working. This implies that women in these occupations often prioritize their careers and may delay childbearing or choose to have fewer children with the intention of focusing on their professional aspirations, hence, having an effect on reducing population growth. The results further reveal that womenin occupational categories such as sales and services, agricultural–self–employed, agricultural employee, skilled manual and unskilled manual tend to statistically have more logs of counts of children ever born just like women who are not working. This means that women in these occupational categories have effects to increase population growth. The study further reveals that women in occupational categories such as sales and services and household and domestic are statistically not significant to have an effect on fertility. This infers that women in these occupational categories have no effect to increase or reduce population. Other covariates that were included in the study and were found to be statistically significant in influencing fertility were: age, marital status, place of residence, wealth index, contraceptive use, desire for more children as well as education. Accordingly, the study recommends that the government of Malawi, Banja La Mtsogolo and Family Health Services should critically continue to encourage access to family planning services to women whose occupation categories contribute to higher fertility levels for population control.

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School	: School of Law, Economics and Government
Issued Date	: 2024

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