Children's Education in the Phillipines: Does High Fertility Matter?

This paper examines the effects of family size and sibling position on children's current school enrollment status in the Philippines. The theoretical framework focuses on the determinants of children's participation in alternative activities, specifically schooling, market work, and home production. This approach allows for a greater understanding of the mechanisms through which fertility, as reflected by number of siblings and sibling composition, influences children's education than would examining the determinants of schooling alone. The model is estimated using the 1983 wave of the Bicol Multipurpose Survey. The results indicate the existence of negative effects of fertility on school enrollment, which, in part, operate through work status. In addition, these effects differ according to the sibling position of the child.