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quality of their children. However, toward the end of the nineteenth century, Galor asserts, “further increases in the rate of technological progress induced a reduction in fertility, generating a decline in population growth and an increase in the average level of education.”
    As economic growth was increasingly fueled by the development of ever more complicated technologies and management services, the premium attached to education began to increase. The result is that parents switched from having more children to investing in fewer higher quality (more educated) children.
    Galor further argues that at the turn of the twentieth century, international trade encouraged fertility rates to fall further as rich countries began to specialize in the production of the sorts of goods that required a lot of human capital to make. On the other hand, Galor contends that poor countries increasingly specialized in goods that required a lot of manual labor to produce. The result was rising income for both rich and poor countries, but a fateful divergence in fertility trends.
    During the twentieth century, fertility rates basically continued to fall in rich countries as they invested in more human capital, especially in higher levels of education. In addition, as demand for human capital grew in rich countries, schooling expanded to include women, who then entered the paid workforce. This further raised the opportunity costs of having children and encouraged further reductions in fertility.
    On the other hand, poor countries channeled a larger share of their gains from increased international trade into producing more children. As a consequence, “the demographic transition in these nonindustrial economies has been significantly delayed,” asserts Galor, “increasing further their relative abundance of unskilled labor, enhancing their comparative disadvantage in the production of skill-intensive goods, and delaying their process of development.”
    OECD economist Fabrice Murtin concurs with Galor that education is the key to lower fertility rates. In his 2009 study “On the Demographic Transition,” Murtin assembled data from seventy-one countries from 1870 to 2000, to conclude that “education, rather than income or health-related variables, is the most robust determinant of the birth rate, potentially explaining about 50 to 80 percent of its decrease when average schooling grows from 0 to 10 years.” Galor cites data showing that the percentage of British children ages six to fourteen who were in school rose from about 10 percent in 1860 to more than 80 percent by 1895.
    As noted previously, demographer Wolfgang Lutz argues that it’s not just more education, but specifically more schooling for girls that correlates with deep cuts in fertility rates. For instance, the fertility rate for Ethiopian women with no formal education was 6.1 children in 2005 and 2.0 for women with secondary and higher education. Providing women access to higher education is associated with longer lives for themselves and lower child mortality. Lutz calculates that world population in 2060 would be 1 billion fewer if the education of women globally could be speeded up to the rate achieved by South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s.
    As Galor noted, the demographic transition was delayed in many poor countries, but in the second half of the twentieth century these countries also began to see rapid declines in their fertility rates. Bucknell University political scientist John Doces finds that increasing international trade is now propelling the demographic transition throughout much of the developing world. In fact, as global fertility declined since the 1950s, the value of world merchandise exports during the same period has soared by nearly ninety times.
    In his 2011 study “Globalization and Population: International Trade and the Demographic Transition,” Doces looks at recent data from a large number of