THE CAUSAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INFANT MORTALITY AND FERTILITY RATE IN GHANA: ECONOMETRIC AND TIME SERIES ANALYSIS

Infant mortality has been a major public health issue from time immemorial. Understanding the association between infant and childhood mortality and total fertility is essential especially to countries that are currently undergoing demographic transition. The study therefore examined the relationship between infant mortality and fertility rate in Ghana by using a time series data stemming from 1960 to 2016.The research employed Granger causality test, error correction model (ECM) and multiple correlation coefficient to deduce the association between infant and childhood mortality and fertility rate of women in Ghana. The results of the Pairwise Granger causality test reveals a unidirectional causality and hence proved to be dependent on total fertility rate (TFR) and ECM shows a positive long-run relationship among the variables. In conclusion, the rate of increase or decrease in total fertility will leads to a tremendous increase or decrease in infant and childhood mortality. In this study, the rate of decline on Ghana's total fertility rate led to a sharp reduction on infant and childhood mortality rate from 124.2 per 1000 live birth in 1960 to 37.2 per 1000 live births in 2016 and this might be expected as hording behavior diminishes overtime.