Fertility and the oil curse

The paper empirically investigates whether oil abundance affects fertility in a panel of developing and developed countries for 1970–2020. The exploration sheds light into why poor developing economies rich in natural resources such as Sub-Saharan African countries have stagnated with high fertility. It finds that fertility rises once oil abundance crosses a threshold level, below which fertility drops, controlling for oil volatility and per-capita GDP. The effect operates in part through women empowerment proxied by female’s labor supply and education. It is also found that oil volatility raises fertility. Besides, we observe a reversal of fertility decline once income reaches a certain level.