1. Reply to the note by Frejka and Sardon on our paper ‘Patterns of low and lowest-low fertility in Europe’ and an erratum.
- Author
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Billari, FrancescoC. and Kohler, Hans-Peter
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FERTILITY , *FERTILITY decline , *HUMAN fertility , *HUMAN reproduction - Abstract
The article presents the authors' views in response to a comment on their paper "Patterns of Low and Lowest-Low Fertility in Europe," published in a 2004 issue of the journal "Population Studies." In their comment, the critics have argued that the cohort-fertility analysis in the aforesaid paper is weak on theoretical grounds and the empirical analysis is incomplete. The authors affirm that they agree with the comment that, as a society, the Netherlands differs from Southern Europe and even more from Central and Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, from a contemporary global perspective, these differences should not be overemphasized. They say that in their analyses, they used the Netherlands as a reference case of a country with an extraordinary pattern of late childbearing that is not associated with lowest-low fertility levels. However, the critics believe that these unusual characteristics invalidate the use of the Dutch example in the paper. So, this criticism is misconceived. It is precisely the unusualness of the fertility pattern in the Netherlands that makes it a useful reference point in the study of low and lowest-low fertility.
- Published
- 2005
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