Demographic Pressure and Development in a Gender Perspective: A focus on sub-Saharan Africa
Demography
30
Issue: 2
(11 - 2016)
High fertility and demographic pressure — combined with lack of gender equality and women’s
empowerment - may put in doubt development. The aim of our analysis is to study the role played by
both the demographic pressure and social behavior on the Human Development Index (HDI) in the
sub-Saharan Africa. After analyzing the territorial variability of HDI among and into some countries at
district level in years around 1990, 2000 and 2010, we intend to understand if there is some form of
association between Municipal Human Development Index and some indicators of socio-demographic
structure.The hypothesis we want to verify is that the higher the level of demographic pressure
(expressed by dependency ratios) and the worse the social context, the lower the level of
development, according to the approach of “demographic window”. This study enriches the literature
by exploring the effect of the demographic window of opportunity on economic growth at district level
within some countries of sub-Saharan Africa, in relationship with some indicators of women’s status and
gender equality as proxies of women’s empowerment. Our results demonstrate a negative effect of the
dependent population (young and old people) and a positive effect of indices of women’s
empowerment on development. In the model explaining the relation between development,
dependency ratios and women’s empowerment at local level, the inclusion of the dummies of the
countries does not change the effects of the covariates, thus suggesting that the former relationships are
not mediated through the country-time variables.
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