Anales del Congreso ALAP
Anales del X Congreso ALAP

This work contributes to understanding the potentially heterogeneous consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic for changes in the number of births by mothers’ age and educational attainment in contexts of high socioeconomic inequality and relatively poor institutional response to the health and economic crises spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic. Using register data on births and deaths for Latin American countries (Brazil and Colombia in the current version of this paper), we document state-level correlations between the intensity of the pandemic -measured by current, nine-month lagged, and cumulative excess mortality, and the observed number of births relative to a Covid-19-free hypothetical scenario. We disaggregate these correlations according to the mother’s age and educational attainment to test the hypothesis that the prompt consequences of the Covid-19 on births interact with pre-existing forms of social inequality, potentially deepening socioeconomic gaps across subpopulations in these two countries. We argue that highlighting the socioeconomic-specific consequences of the pandemic is of utter importance and may go beyond differences by years of schooling as ethnic, migration status, and sexual minorities in several contexts, including high-income countries, may be suffering the consequences of Covid-19 pandemic differently compared to the majority of the population.