The poverty trap with high fertility rates
Noriyoshi Hemmi
Faculty of Economics, HOKKAI GAKUEN UNIVERSITY

Abstract
The aim of this paper is to clarify the causes of the poverty trap resulting from a negative correlation between income and fertility, in a manner that is consistent with the data across and within countries. This paper points out that a higher fertility rate is the cause of the poverty trap, because of its educational cost aspect.

For useful comments and suggestions, I am indebted to Koichi futagami, associate editor Eric Hanushek, Tatsuro Iwaisako, Akira Momota, Testuo Ono, Yoshiyasu Ono, Makoto Saito, and the anonymous referees of this journal. Of course, any remaining errors are all my own. Citation: Hemmi, Noriyoshi, (2003) "The poverty trap with high fertility rates." Economics Bulletin, Vol. 9, No. 6 pp. 1−4 Submitted: June 19, 2003. Accepted: October 24, 2003. URL: http://www.economicsbulletin.com/2003/volume9/EB−03I20001A.pdf

1. Introduction It is known well that a high fertility rate is one of the most remarkable features of the developing countries (Birdsall 1988). And the fact is commonly recognized to be one of the serious problems which developing countries face. 1 This common recognition is drawn from the natural inference that a high fertility rate is not only the result of poverty, but the causes of the poverty. The recent paper, which has the recognition that a high fertility rate is the causes of the poverty, is Kremer and Chen (1999) 2 , in which the influence by endogenizing fertility rates shows up through the labor market. In this paper, we deal with an overlapping generations model similar to Glomm and Ravikumar (1992), in which human capital investment through formal schooling is the engine of growth. However, to investigate a relationship between a fertility rate and educational opportunities created by parents (for example, a quality of schools), in our model the fertility rate is determined endogenously, whereas