A note on landholding and fertility in rural South Africa.

GENUS abstract: This paper analyses the relationship between asset ownership and demographic behaviour amongst rural households in South Africa, on the basis of the 1993 LSDS survey. The own-children method indicates that women from households using communal land for growing crops bear more children than women from households having their own, or renting, farm land. Multiple regression, however, suggests that the type of land use scarcely affects fertility, which seems to depend, rather, on landholding (negatively) and on the size of cultivated land (positively). The results obtained confirm classical hypotheses about the security effect of land ownership on fertility and about the affluence and labour demand effect exerted by land ownership on increased demand for sons.