Mortality–fertility synergies during the demographic transition in the developed world

The classic theory used to explain the demographic transition assumes that mortality is the key explanatory variable influencing the decline in fertility. However, the empirical results obtained in what is known as the Princeton European Fertility Project have led many specialists to question this assumption. Using both national and provincial aggregated data for 25 countries over a long time span, the analysis reported in this paper found that mortality does indeed play a fundamental role in accounting for the main demographic changes that occurred both before and during the transitional period. Others’ research based on individual data has shown clearly that the number of surviving children was indeed an important factor for reproductive decisions. My analysis, using aggregated data, reached largely similar conclusions regarding the role of mortality in changing reproductive trends, via its impact on nuptiality and marital fertility at different stages of the demographic transition.     

Fertility and development: evidence from Brazil

Using microdata from the Brazilian demographic censuses of 1960, 1970, 1980, and 1991, aggregated into 518 consistently defined spatial units called microregions, we estimated fertility and mortality and constructed indicators of development and living conditions in the rural and urban areas of the microregions in each census. We then estimated cross-sectional and fixed-effects models to answer questions about the degree to which changes in these indicators are associated with changes in fertility and whether the relationship between fertility and development shifts through time. We found strong and consistent relationships between the decline in fertility and measurable changes in social and economic circumstances.     

The educational gradient of childbearing within cohabitation in Europe

Nearly every European Country has experienced some increase in nonmarital childbearing, largely due to increasing births within cohabitation. Relatively few studies in Europe, however, investigate the educational gradient of childbearing within cohabitation or how it changed over time. Using retrospective union and fertility histories, we employ competing risk hazard models to examine the educational gradient of childbearing in cohabitation in eight countries across europe. In all countries studied, birth risks within cohabitation demonstrated a negative educational gradient. When directly comparing cohabiting fertility with marital fertility, the negative educational gradient persists in all countries except Italy, although differences were not significant in Austria, France, and West Germany. To explain these findings, we present an alternative explanation for the increase in childbearing within cohabitation that goes beyond the explanation of the Second Demographic Transition and provides a new interpretation of the underlying mechanisms that may influence childbearing within cohabitation.     

Age at marriage,family planning practices,and other variables as correlates of fertility in Korea

The relationships between fertility and thirteen variables are examined in three groups of married Korean women, about 400 each from urban, rural, and semi-rural areas. Data were obtained by interview. Age at marriage and family planning practice are the strongest predictors of fertility and account for about 10 percent and 7 percent of the total variance, respectively. Other factors which accounted for lesser fractions of variability are ideal number of children, rural versus urban residence, education, aspiration for daughters, exposure to mass media, and economic status. Most of the relationships appear to be stable over time; others, which are associated with modernization, appear to be changing. The thirteen variables combined can account for a maximum of 40 percent of the variance in fertility.     

Natural resource collection and desired family size: a longitudinal test of environment-population theories

Theories relating the changing environment to human fertility predict that declining natural resources may actually increase the demand for children. Unfortunately, most previous empirical studies have been limited to cross-sectional designs that limit our ability to understand links between processes that change over time. We take advantage of longitudinal measurement spanning more than a decade of change in the natural environment, household agricultural behaviors, and individual fertility preferences to reexamine this question. Using fixed effect models, we find that women experiencing increasing time required to collect firewood to heat and cook or fodder to feed animals (the dominant needs for natural resources in this setting) increased their desired family size, even as many other macro-level changes have reduced desired family size. In contrast to previous, cross-sectional studies, we find no evidence of such a relationship for men. Our findings regarding time spent collecting firewood are also new. These results support the “vicious circle” perspective and economic theories of fertility pointing to the value of children for household labor. This feedback from natural resource constraint to increased fertility is an important mechanism for understanding long-term environmental change.     

Fertility Decline in Czechoslovakia During the Last Two Centuries

The decline of fertility in Czechoslovakia on the territory of the Czech Socialist Republic began with a rise in the age at marriage; the decline of marital fertility began only after 1860. On the territory of the Slovak Socialist Republic marital fertility began to decline after 1900 without previous significant changes in the age at marriage. The differences between the demographic behaviour in the two parts of Czechoslovakia have persisted, although they are now gradually disappearing. There are other significant regional differences in the fertility decline caused by the overall process of economic and social development. The end of the demographic transition in the Czech Socialist Republic came during the 1930's and in the Slovak Socialist Republic during the 1960's.     

性别偏好视角下的中国人口转变模式分析

文章基于传统的人口转变理论,从生育空间的三维性出发,提出了性别偏好视角下的中国人口转变模式。利用全国和分省的总和生育率及出生人口性别比数据进行验证,实证结果表明中国人口转变中存在带有性别偏好的人口转变模式:出生人口性别比伴随生育水平和性别偏好的动态变化而呈现出上升、高位徘徊的阶段特征和下降的趋势,这种变动趋势又因生育空间的区域差异呈现出4种区域类型。     

"发展-计划生育-生育率"的动态关系:中国省级数据再考察

顾宝昌在1987年利用省级数据考察了中国的生育率,通过路径分析得出社会经济发展和计划生育对中国生育率都有重要的直接影响的结论.李建民在2004年分析了我国低生育率的经济环境,提出1990年代我国生育率的下降应该主要是社会和经济发展的结果.基于这些结论或假设,本文利用中国省级数据,再次考察"发展-计划生育-生育率"关系,结果表明在过去30年里,计划生育的作用在下降,而社会经济发展的作用在增强.1970年代计划生育的作用是主导,1980年代计划生育与社会经济发展二者的作用基本达到了平衡,而1990年代社会经济发展的作用成为主导."发展-计划生育-生育率"关系呈献出一种动态平衡.     

Happiness: Before and After the Kids

Understanding how having children influences parents’ subjective well-being (“happiness”) has great potential to explain fertility behavior. We study parental happiness trajectories before and after the birth of a child, using large British and German longitudinal data sets. We account for unobserved parental characteristics using fixed-effects models and study how sociodemographic factors modify the parental happiness trajectories. Consistent with existing work, we find that happiness increases in the years around the birth of a first child and then decreases to before-child levels. Moreover, happiness increases before birth, suggesting that the trajectories may capture not only the effect of the birth but also the broader process of childbearing, which may include partnership formation and quality. Sociodemographic factors strongly modify this pattern. Those who have children at older ages or who have more education have a particularly positive happiness response to a first birth; and although having the first two children increases happiness, having a third child does not. The results, which are similar in Britain and Germany, suggest that having up to two children increases happiness, and mostly for those who have postponed childbearing. This pattern is consistent with the fertility behavior that emerged during the second demographic transition and provides new insights into low and late fertility.     

Demographic transition in Arab countries: A new perspective

This paper provides a new perspective on the fertility transition in Arab countries. It shows that the story of Arab fertility must be retold: the story is of a region with the highest fertility preferences, exhibiting reluctance to change due to the stranglehold of cultural forces, and just starting to respond to development forces. The paper shows that Arab regional experience is quite comparable to that of other developing countries and that, though the fertility decline occurred at a somewhat later date, the pace of decline more than compensates for this delay. Furthermore, the probing of country level experiences and forces underlying the transition shows the diversities of these experiences and the exaggeration of the role of cultural specificity. It also demonstrates that a large part of the decline in Arab fertility is due to changes in nuptiality. For some segments of society and some countries, these changes are not paralleled by increased opportunities for women to have more fulfilling lives. For these women, the fertility decline is not necessarily improving the quality of their lives and cannot be equated with progress and development.     

The demography of words: The global decline in non-numeric fertility preferences, 1993–2011

This paper examines the decline in non-numeric responses to questions about fertility preferences among women in the developing world. These types of response—such as ‘don’t know’ or ‘it’s up to God’—have often been interpreted through the lens of fertility transition theory as an indication that reproduction has not yet entered women’s ‘calculus of conscious choice’. However, this has yet to be investigated cross-nationally and over time. Using 19?years of data from 32 countries, we find that non-numeric fertility preferences decline most substantially in the early stages of a country’s fertility transition. Using country-specific and multilevel models, we explore the individual- and contextual-level characteristics associated with women’s likelihood of providing a non-numeric response to questions about their fertility preferences. Non-numeric fertility preferences are influenced by a host of social factors, with educational attainment and knowledge of contraception being the most robust and consistent predictors.     

The Differential Influence of Women's Residential District on the Risk of Entering First Marriage and Motherhood in Western Germany

This paper investigates the role of women's residential district in the process of family formation in western Germany during the 1980s and 1990s. Our analysis of the transition to first marriage and motherhood is based on the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), which we merge with a rich set of district-level data. The estimated multilevel discrete-time logit models suggest that (1) basically all regional heterogeneity in women's entry into parenthood is due to differences in the respondents' marital status, while there is (2) a constant and significant regional variation in women's first marriage probabilities, which cannot be explained by population composition or by structural contextual effects. Thus, regional influences on fertility behavior do not have an autonomous quality, but are merely mediated through a latent contextual effect on women's risk of entering first marriage, which we attribute to regional socio-cultural milieus.     

Ready,Willing, and Able? Impediments to the Onset of Marital Fertility Decline in the United States

This study relies on IPUMS samples of the 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880 censuses, aggregate census data, and the timing of state laws criminalizing abortion to construct regional estimates of marital fertility in the United States and estimate correlates of marital fertility. The results show a significant lag between the onset of marital fertility decline in the nation’s northeastern census divisions and its onset in western and southern census divisions. Empirical models indicate the presence of cultural, economic, and legal impediments to the diffusion of marital fertility control and illustrate the need for more inclusive models of fertility decline.     

Fertility and economic and social development in Turkey: a cross-sectional and time series study

Abstract The paper explores the impact of modernization on the fertility levels in Turkey, which started deliberate efforts at economic, social, and political transformation in the early 1920s. It is a disaggregative study using 'province' as the unit of observation. A relatively consistent series of data on population and various economic and social variables was available with quinquennial censuses starting with the 1940 Census. The technique of reverse projection is used to estimate provincial crude birth rates. Since 1955 there has been a consistent decline in the fertility level. A chain-relationship model is estimated using both cross-sectional and panel data. A major finding of the study is that in Turkey, continuing modernization and the concomitant spread of female education will result in a continuing decline in the fertility rate. This negative influence, stable and substantial over time, is largely due to factors other than the usual association between education and opportunity cost of female employment, such as changing attitudes and tastes. Also with the spread of economic and social development influencing the society's norm for average age at marriage and the proportion of women married, the marital rate, though not so significant as education, imparts a direct depressing effect on the aggregate period fertility rate at any given time.     

生育理性和生育决策与我国低生育水平稳定机制的转变

自改革开放以来 ,我国人口生育率水平出现了迅速的转变 ,特别是 1 992年我国确立了市场经济为目标的经济改革以来 ,生育率水平更是进一步降低到更替水平以下。如果说 ,生育率的迅速转变是在国家计划生育政策干预下启动的 ,那么 ,在 1 990年代生育率的下降应该主要是社会和经济发展的结果。以市场经济为导向的经济改革和经济的迅速发展 ,已经为稳定我国城市地区人口低生育率水平提供了必要的经济条件 ,同时 ,制度、技术和文化等因素的变革已经为我国个人生育决策理性化创造了条件 ,低生育水平的稳定机制已经开始从政策控制为主转向群众自我控制为主的转变     

Spatial Analysis of the Causes of Fertility Decline in Prussia

This article contributes to the geographic analysis of fertility decline in the demographic transition in Europe. We reanalyze Galloway, Hammel, and Lee's (1994) Prussian data with spatial analysis methods. Our multivariate analysis provides evidence of the predictive effect of both economic and cultural variables. Furthermore, even after all of the observable economic, social, and cultural variables have been controlled for, our findings show that a significant unexplained geographic clustering of fertility decline remains. We then specify spatial econometric models, which show that in addition to economic and cultural factors, socio‐geographic factors such as being adjacent to areas of sharp fertility decline are also needed to understand the pattern of fertility decline. These results provide new support for the role of social diffusion in the process, while allowing for the direct structural effects of economic change.     

Pensions and fertility: back to the roots

Fertility has long been declining in industrialised countries and the existence of public pension systems is considered as one of the causes. This paper provides detailed evidence on the mechanism by which a public pension system depresses fertility, based on historical data. Our theoretical framework highlights that the effect of a public pension system on fertility is ex ante ambiguous while its size is determined by the internal rate of return of the pension system. We identify an overall negative effect of the introduction of pension insurance on fertility using regional variation across 23 provinces of Imperial Germany in key variables of Bismarck’s pension system, which was introduced in Imperial Germany in 1891. The negative effect on fertility is robust to controlling for the traditional determinants of the first demographic transition as well as to other policy changes.     

The demographic transition in southern Africa: Another look at the evidence from Botswana and Zimbabwe

Botswana and Zimbabwe have been acclaimed as being on the vanguard of the demographic transition in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper examines the comparability of the CPS and the DHS data for each country and finds that part of the observed decline in aggregate fertility rates in both countries can be attributed to differences in sample composition. Women of the same cohort tend to be better educated in the second survey relative to the first. This fact explains part—but not all—of the observed fertility decline; for example, it appears to account for up to half the observed decline among women age 25–34 in 1984 in Zimbabwe.     

Family Policies and the Western European Fertility Divide: Insights from a Natural Experiment in Belgium

Countries in Northwestern Europe, including Belgium, report cohort fertility levels of close to two children per woman; whereas Central European countries, such as Germany, have levels of around 1.6 children. In seeking to explain these differences, some scholars have stressed the role of the social policy context, while others have pointed to variation in fertility‐related social norms. But because these influences are interdependent, it is difficult to isolate their effects on fertility trends. This study attempts to disentangle these two factors by drawing on a quasi‐natural experiment. After World War I Germany was compelled to cede the Eupen–Malmedy territory to Belgium. The population of this region has retained its German linguistic identity, but has been subject to Belgian social policies. We examine whether the fertility trends in this German‐speaking region of Belgium follow the Belgian or the German pattern. Our findings indicate that they generally resemble the Belgian pattern. This suggests that institutional factors are important for understanding the current fertility differences in Western Europe.