The quantity-quality transition in Ghana: chance and choice.

This research has been funded by a grant from the POLICY Project of the Futures Group titled "The Implications of Excess Fertility and Unintended Births for Childrens Schooling." The transition from high to low fertility and from low levels of investment in childrens education to high levels of investment has been described as a quantity-quality transition. This transition is central to the process of economic development in that when fertility falls and schooling levels rise one can expect to see subsequent reductions in the rate of growth of the labor force and subsequent increases in the level of human capital per worker. In studying the quantity-quality transition economists have often assumed that fertility and schooling outcomes are the result of deliberate family strategies and they have given comparatively little attention to imperfect fertility control or to the schooling outcomes that can be only partly determined by family decisions. As will be seen in our data such departures from desired fertility and schooling strategies are common and their implications need to be better understood. This paper examines the situation in southern Ghana a setting in which fertility decline is only recently underway and in which new dimensions of childrens schooling are attracting the attention of parents. (authors)