Diverging reproductive outcomes by maternal education during the Covid‐19 pandemic across Brazilian and Colombian regions

Abstract

This work contributes to the current understanding of the heterogeneous impact of the Covid‐19 pandemic on fertility. Using more than 36.4 million birth and death records for Brazil and Colombia (2015–2021), we document state‐level correlations between the intensity of the pandemic, measured by the current and 9‐month lagged excess mortality, and the observed number of births relative to a Covid‐19‐free hypothetical scenario. We disaggregate these correlations according to maternal age and years of schooling to test the hypothesis that the influence of the Covid‐19 pandemic on births interacted with pre‐existing forms of social inequality. Results from multivariate linear models suggest that the association between the intensity of the pandemic and the relative number of births was negative for women with at least 8 years of schooling, while it was positive or null for women with fewer years of education. This result means that in subnational areas severely hit by the Covid‐19 pandemic, women with few years of schooling did not delay fertility as most women potentially did. These results suggest that disadvantaged groups in Latin America and potentially in other contexts may suffer more acutely the consequences of the Covid‐19 pandemic, which has been largely neglected by studies that assume homogeneous impacts of Covid‐19 on population dynamics.