Fertility Preferences and Outcomes in Morocco: Does Women's Empowerment Matter in Actual-ideal Gap?

In Morocco, the fertility transition process, like changes in fertility preferences, has been accompanied by a notable improvement in women's status. The aim of this paper is to study the impact of Moroccan women's empowerment on the actual-ideal gap, an indicator that measures the gap between two components, the number of surviving children and the ideal number of children, and hence on their ability to limit their fertility to this ideal. To build a good indicator of the empowerment, we used the SWPER composite index proposed in the literature, which is based on several dimensions, including participation in decision-making, attitude towards male violence, and other conventional measures of women's status such as education and participation in economic activity. The empirical examination was conducted using the Skellam method, which models difference between two Poisson variables. Data were derived from two national population and family health surveys conducted in 2004 and 2011. The results indicate that there is a plausible negative association between women's empowerment and the ideal number of children. However, the relationship with the number of surviving children is not always verified. The lack of a link between women's empowerment and the actual-ideal gap can hide a non-symmetric and equally strong effect on its two components. Moreover, in an advanced transition context, women's empowerment may not operate significantly on surviving fertility because of actual constraints like contraceptive efficiency and sex preferences.