The effects of infant mortality on fertility revisited: New evidence from Latin America

In this paper we examine empirical evidence for a relation between infant a nd child mortality and fertility in Latin American countries from 1920 to 1 990. We investigate the relation at several levels of aggregation and evalu ate the extent to which evidence at one level is consistent with evidence a t other levels. We first examine aggregate cross-country information over s everal decades, a type of data typically used in past research on the topic . We also examine yearly series of births, deaths, infant deaths, and socio economic indicators for selected countries to track the association between short-term fluctuations infertility and infant mortality. Finally, we use micro-level data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) to assess th e relation between fertility and child mortality from individual reproducti ve histories. The evidence we assemble from these different data sets is re markably consistent and suggests small positive effects of infant mortality on fertility. These effects, however; may be too small to support the hypo thesis that changes in child mortality are of more than modest importance i n the process of fertility decline in Latin America in the late twentieth c entury.