World system status, techno-economic heritage, and fertility

The relevance of world system/dependency theory, and ecological-evolutionary theory for the population processes of currently developing nations is explored and evaluated by testing hypotheses drawn from models of fertility and fertility decline implied by them. Despite the preliminary and necessarily limited nature of the tests and measures, some support is found for hypotheses drawn from boh perspectives. Techno-economic heritage is found to affect fertility change directly, and world system status and techno-economic heritage are each found to affect fertility level and fertility change through independent effects on intervening variables. In addition, a significant interaction effect of techno-economic heritage and world system status on fertility level is found.