In mid-demographic-transition, many Asian countries enjoyed a large demographic 'dividend': extra economic growth owing to falling dependant/workforce ratios, or slower natural increase, or both. We estimate the dividend, 1985-2025, in sub-Saharan Africa and its populous countries. Dependency and natural increase peaked around 1985, 20 years after Asia. The UN projects an acceleration of the subsequent slow falls but disregards slowish declines in young-age mortality and thus, we argue, overestimates future fertility decline. Even if one accepts their projection, arithmetical and econometric evidence suggests an annual, if not total, dividend well below Asia's. The dividend arises more from falling dependency than reduced natural increase, and could be increased by accelerating the fertility decline (e.g., by reducing young-age mortality) or by employing a larger workforce productively. Any dividend from transition apart, low saving in much of Africa (unlike Asia) means that, given likely natural increase, current consumption per person is unsustainable because it depletes capital per person.
Household survey data for developing and transitional economies are used to estimate the effect of fertility (crude birth rate net of infant deaths) on private consumption poverty. Cross-national regressions indicate that higher fertility increases poverty both by retarding economic growth and by skewing distribution against the poor. Our median country in 1980 had 'dollar-a-day' poverty incidence of 18.9 per cent; had it reduced its fertility by four per 1,000 throughout the 1980s (the sample median fall), it is estimated that incidence would have been reduced to 13.9 per cent, the growth and distribution effects being roughly equally responsible for this reduction.
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