In order to address the dramatic drop in fertility and the dearth of data from transitional economies, this study aims to examine the effects of macroeconomic factors – GDP per capita, unemployment, inflation and income – on fertility rates in Vietnam between 1990 and 2024.
This paper applies the autoregressive distributed lag/error correction model framework to time-series data from the World Bank and the General Statistics Office of Vietnam, complemented by Zivot–Andrews structural break tests and a vector autoregression model. This multi-step approach captures both short-run dynamics and long-run equilibrium relationships, while ensuring robustness through impulse response and variance decomposition analyses.
In the short run, unemployment exerts a positive and significant effect on fertility, whereas lagged inflation shows a strong negative effect, indicating the delayed influence of macroeconomic instability on reproductive behavior. In the long run, none of the macroeconomic variables has a statistically significant effect on fertility, despite the presence of a cointegrating relationship. Fertility fluctuations are largely driven by their own intrinsic dynamics rather than by macroeconomic shocks.
This is the first study to specifically examine the causal link between macroeconomic variables and fertility in Vietnam, offering novel evidence from a transitional economy and contributing to the global literature by highlighting how macroeconomic factors shape fertility mainly in the short run, while long-run dynamics are driven by structural and socio-cultural inertia.
