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Children affect women's opportunities in the labour markets of most advanced countries in three ways: an immediate effect on employment, and effects on longer term earning power and pension coverage. This paper quantifies these impacts on women's lifetime income for hypothetical illustrative British cases. New results, based on data collected during the 1990s, are compared with estimates from 1980. Although childrearing and employment have increasingly been combined over the period, the estimated loss of gross earnings associated with motherhood remains substantial. It still amounts to around half potential earnings post childbirth for less qualified sections of the British female labour force, but has become smaller for highly qualified women. The paper examines the effect of the tax/benefit system on the costs, and makes some assumptions about the distribution of net costs between mothers and fathers. It also shows how far motherhood jeopardizes financial security in old age, particularly for the least qualified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the earliest stages of the British fertility decline, falling mean family size was accompanied by marked rises in the proportion of married women who remained childless or who bore only a single child. This paper summarises those changes, their impact on average family size, and the implications for estimates of the proportions of couples who attempted to space their children in the early years of marriage. The explanatory power of some commonly cited interpretations of the general decline in marital fertility is then considered in the context of this growth in number of families of highly restricted fertility. The paper highlights a need for more emphasis on descriptive and analytical approaches that are sensitive to distributions within populations. Also emphasized is the importance of developing interpretations that allow for the possibility that different factors may operate on different sub-sets of families at different points in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is increasing concern about the lack of accuracy in population projections at national levels. A common problem has been the systematic underestimation of improvements in mortality, especially at older ages, resulting in projections that are too low. In this paper, we present a method that is based on projecting survivorship rather than mortality, which uses the same data but differs technically. In particular, rather than extrapolating trends in mortality, we use trends in life expectancy to establish a robust statistical relation between changes in life expectancy and survivorship using period life tables. We test the approach on data for England and Wales for the population aged 50 and over, and show that it gives more accurate projections than official projections using the same base data. Using the model to project the population aged 50 and over to 2020, our method suggests nearly 0.6 million more people in this age group than official projections. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents estimates of the level and trend of the fertility of different ethnic minorities in the UK from the 1960s up to 2006. The fertility estimates are derived primarily from the Labour Force Survey using the Own-Child method, with additional information from the General Household Survey and vital registration data. Comparisons are made between the level of fertility of UK-born and immigrant mothers from minority groups, and the fertility of the populations in the country of origin. Total fertility in all groups has fallen from levels that were initially relatively high. That of some UK ethnic groups has already fallen to about the level of the UK national average (e.g., black Caribbean) or below it (e.g., Indian and Chinese). Only among Pakistani and Bangladeshi women does total fertility remain substantially above the national average despite a continuous decrease over the last 20 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The differences in internal mobility between national populations are large and complex in origin. In studying them we must use comparable indicators. This paper discusses how measures of migration intensity at the national level should be constructed, drawing on analyses of residential mobility in Australia and Britain. We argue for the tailoring of intensity measures to observation plan and to age-time plan, and for removing the effects of mortality and external migration on census-based measures. We propose simple estimation of infant migrants, a standard stopping-age in calculating gross measures of migration, and argue for the use of a common population for computing age-standardized measures of migration and a common mortality schedule for computing migration expectancies. We conclude with recommendations for developing comparable cross-national measures of migration intensity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Population estimates play an important role in the allocation of resources at many levels of government and commerce but little is known about the accuracy of age-specific population estimates. Such knowledge is crucial, as resource allocation is often targeted at populations of particular age, and decisions need to be based on the reliability of the estimates. This paper presents a multi-level statistical analysis of the accuracy of age-specific population estimates made for British local authorities in 1991. The aim of this work is to identify the factors that influence accuracy, and to investigate how these influences interact. Our analyses show that the following area characteristics are key factors: true population size; intercensal population change; and percentages of unemployed residents, armed forces residents, and students. In addition, we find that the overall type of method used to calculate estimates is important, and that its effect varies both with area characteristics and with age-group. Local census methods are found to be generally superior, but a low-cost apportionment method, if implemented well, may be as effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]