According to the United Nations World Population Prospects, Africa is expected to account for more than half of the population growth in the world in the next three decades. And by the turn of the 22nd century, the populations of the poorest 33 African countries will have likely tripled. These demographic developments present challenges and opportunities for sustained growth and economic development in Africa. On the one hand, for example, they make it harder for cities to grow harmoniously, and for governments to fight poverty and inequality, while expanding health and education services. On the other hand, the potential for a demographic transition opens the door to the possibility of reaping the fruits of a demographic dividend, which was so important in the take-off of Europe towards modern growth.

We reconsider the well-known Becker–Coase (BC) theorem according to which changes in divorce law should not affect divorce rates. We do that in a context of households that consume public goods in addition to private goods. For the Becker–Coase theorem to hold in this setting, utility must be transferable both within marriage and upon divorce, and the marginal rate of substitution between public and private consumption needs to be invariant in marital status. We show that if divorce alters the way some goods are consumed (either because some goods that are public in marriage become private in divorce or because divorce affects either the marginal rate of substitution between public and private goods or even the cardinalization of a spouse’s utility), then the Becker–Coase theorem holds only for very specific preferences. We conclude that, in general, divorce laws will influence the divorce rate, although the impact of a change in divorce laws can go in either direction.

Before the Industrial Revolution, most scientists considered fertility, mortality and population as interacting with economic circumstances. When Khaldun (1377) pioneered classical economics, he described how population interplays with the rise and decline of cities by allowing a deeper division of labor and generating increasing returns to scale. When, in the 17th century, Petty (1687) compared the relative development of England, France, and Holland, population was at the center of his calculations, both as an outcome and source of wealth. And, according to the French physiocrats (Mirabeau 1756) as well as Bruckner (1768), who foreshadowed the Malthusian view on population checks by half a century, population needed to be incentivized to grow.