Abstract

Is the persistently high fertility in West Africa today rooted in the decades of colonial forced labor migration? We study the case of Burkina Faso, where young men were forcibly recruited under French colonial authorities to work in neighboring colonies for one to two years between the 1910s and 1940s. We exploit the historical, temporary partition of Burkina Faso into three zones with different needs for labor to implement a spatial regression discontinuity analysis. We find, in villages from zones historically more exposed to forced labor migration, more temporary male migration to Cˆote d’Ivoireup to today, and lower realized and desired fertility today. We show evidence suggesting that the inherited pattern of low-skill circular migration for adult men reduced reliance on subsistence farming and the accompanying need for child labor. We rule out female empowerment or improvements in human and physical capital as pathways for the fertility decline.