Fertility response to parents' resource collection intensity: evidence from southeast Tigray, northern Ethiopia

The neo-Malthusian argument that greater population adversely affects the natural ecosystem is well researched in the Ethiopian context. However, its counterpart vicious circle approach did not receive much attention so far. This research is generally aimed to explore the impact on households' fertility pattern of natural resource scarcity. Using data collected from 120 rural households in southeast Tigray, biprobit model was initially applied taking care of the simultaneity problem through the two-stage conditional maximum likelihood (2SCML) estimation method. Results show that increasing the weekly parent's resource collection intensity by 10% is likely to promote the demand for an extra child by more than 3%.