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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.

The contributors to this discussion were invited to submit comments, each from a different standpoint, on the paper by John Caldwell and Thomas Schindlmayr that appeared in the preceding issue of the journal. The invitation was issued with the approval of these authors, and the journal is grateful to them for allowing their paper to be used to generate debate on the issues they had raised. The discussion is followed by the authors' response to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the authors' comments on the paper entitled, "Patterns of Low and Lowest-Low Fertility in Europe," by Francesco C. Billari and Hans-Peter Kohler, published in a 2004 issue of the journal "Population Studies." In their comment, the authors argue that the original authors' comparison of cohort-fertility patterns in the lowest-low fertility countries of Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe with Dutch cohort patterns is weak on theoretical grounds and that the empirical analysis is incomplete. The empirical analysis demonstrates that in the young cohorts of Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe, childbearing may very well decline below the levels observed in the Netherlands and in other West European countries. This is already happening in Southern Europe. Moreover, the childbearing surplus in early adulthood is evaporating, and the recuperation that would be needed for completed cohort fertility in these countries to remain above that of many West European countries is of such magnitude that it is doubtful whether it could occur.

The article comments on a previous article related to fertility crisis in modern societies that appeared in the March 2004 issue of the journal Population Studies. Social researchers Francesco Billari, Tomas Frejka, John Hobcraft, Miloslav Macura and Dirk J. van de Kaa broadly endorse authors' paper, while adding valuable supplementary and complementary material. Authors concur with most of the regional and technical elaborations they propose. However, authors take issue with some of the points raised by van de Kaa and Hobcraft, most of which refer to authors' article. Authors assume that no one regards the Western demographic transition over the last century or two as being independent of the Industrial Revolution, as being something that would have happened if incomes had stayed at eighteenth-century levels. If the world passes, in little more than two centuries, from being one of high fertility with a potential for rapid growth as mortality falls, to one where global population is declining then researchers who do not seek overarching explanations may be little heeded.

This paper examines social class differences in fertility, using longitudinal micro-level data for a regional sample in Sweden, 1922–2015. Using discrete-time event history models, we estimated the association between social class and parity-specific duration to next birth, adjusting for household income in separate models. Social class was associated with fertility quite independently from income and the association was both parity-dependent and sex-specific. For transitions to parenthood, higher class position was associated with higher fertility for men and lower fertility for women before 1970, but then converged into a positive association for both sexes after 1990. For continued childbearing, a weak U-shaped relationship before 1947 turned into a positive relationship for second births and a negative relationship for higher-order births in the period after 1990. These patterns likely reflect broader changes in work–family compatibility and are connected to profound shifts in labour markets and institutional arrangements in twentieth-century Sweden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Own Children Method (OCM) is an indirect procedure for deriving age-specific fertility rates and total fertility from children living with their mothers at a census or survey. The method was designed primarily for the calculation of overall fertility, although there are variants that allow the calculation of marital fertility. In this paper we argue that the standard variants for calculating marital fertility can produce misleading results and require strong assumptions, particularly when applied to social or spatial subgroups. We present two new variants of the method for calculating marital fertility: the first of these allows for the presence of non-marital fertility and the second also permits the more robust calculation of rates for social subgroups of the population. We illustrate and test these using full-count census data for England and Wales in 1911. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines whether the fertility of college-educated women is increasing more quickly across cohorts in Generation X than the fertility of their less educated counterparts. Using data from the National Survey of Family Growth in the United States, this study examines the educational differentials in fertility levels and timing across four five-year cohorts of 'Generation Xers'. Results reveal that total fertility rates (TFRs) are increasing across cohorts for all educational groups and the increase is greatest for college-educated women. The increase in cohort TFR among college-educated women is being primarily driven by an increasing proportion of those with two children transitioning to a third birth. The findings in this paper contribute to the current debate on whether there has been a shift in fertility behaviours among college-educated Generation Xers compared with their Baby Boomer counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hong Kong is characterized by very low fertility. However, over a period from 2000 to 2015, both the total number of births and the sex ratio at birth (SRB) increased and then declined dramatically. We analysed the increases in a 2013 paper in this journal, where we largely ascribed them to a rapid growth in the number of 'transient' mothers from Mainland China disproportionately giving birth to boys in the territory. In 2012, policies were implemented to halt this 'maternity migration'. Here, we explore the impact of these policies, both on births and the SRB in Hong Kong. We conclude that the rises and falls in births and SRBs in Hong Kong can, indeed, be broadly ascribed to the reproductive behaviour of transient Mainland mothers. However, the role of the Hong Kong government's policy interventions is much less clearly defined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The total fertility of Muslims in Israel declined from a level of nearly ten children per woman in the mid-1960s to about 4.5 children per woman in the mid-1980s. It then remained close to 4.5 children per woman for nearly 20 years. The reasons for this long stall in the fertility decline are not understood. This paper explores the roles of marriage patterns and marital fertility in the development of the stall in Muslim fertility decline in Israel from 1986 to 2003. The results show that the fertility decline among Muslims in Israel stalled owing to abrupt discontinuations of declines in both the proportion married and marital fertility. The former is explained by the relaxation of a marriage squeeze that had resulted from past fluctuations in fertility. These findings have implications for debates on the determinants of fertility stalls and for demographic transition theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cohort life expectancy is an important but rarely used indicator of mean longevity. In this paper, we show that there are specific advantages in lagging this indicator in time by its own value, an approach termed Lagged Cohort Life Expectancy (LCLE). We discuss the usefulness of LCLE as an indicator for tracking progress in mean longevity and introduce a new interpretation of LCLE as a reference age separating 'early' deaths from 'late' deaths, or, equivalently, as the age above which individuals in a population can be considered 'above-average' survivors. Using data from 15 countries in the Human Mortality Database, we show that current LCLE can be estimated with a relatively high degree of certainty, at least in these low-mortality populations. Results shed new light on levels and trends in mean longevity in these populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to investigate whether there has been a fundamental change in the relationship between economic conditions and fertility. We use panel data methods to study the short-term changes in total fertility and the unemployment rate in a range of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries from 1957 to 2014. We find that although fertility was counter-cyclical before 1970, with good economic times being associated with lower fertility, since then it has become procyclical, with good economic times being associated with higher fertility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The timings of historical fertility transitions in different regions are well understood by demographers, but much less is known regarding their specific features and causes. In the study reported in this paper, we used longitudinal micro-level data for five local populations in Europe and North America to analyse the relationship between socio-economic status and fertility during the fertility transition. Using comparable analytical models and class schemes for each population, we examined the changing socio-economic differences in marital fertility and related these to common theories on fertility behaviour. Our results do not provide support for the hypothesis of universally high fertility among the upper classes in pre- transitional society, but do support the idea that the upper classes acted as forerunners by reducing their fertility before other groups. Farmers and unskilled workers were the latest to start limiting their fertility. Apart from these similarities, patterns of class differences in fertility varied significantly between populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inadequate data and apartheid policies have meant that, until recently, most demographers have not had the opportunity to investigate the level of, and trend in, the fertility of South African women. The 1996 South Africa Census and the 1998 Demographic and Health Survey provide the first widely available and nationally representative demographic data on South Africa since 1970. Using these data, this paper describes the South African fertility decline from 1955 to 1996. Having identified and adjusted for several errors in the 1996 Census data, the paper argues that total fertility at that time was 3.2 children per woman nationally, and 3.5 children per woman for African South Africans. These levels are lower than in any other sub-Saharan African country. We show also that fertility in South Africa has been falling since the 1960s. Thus, fertility transition predates the establishment of a family planning programme in the country in 1974. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the emerging interest in the relationship between homeostatic models and demographic transition theory. Firstly, it considers the nature of fertility measurement and concepts. The paper then goes on to examine evidence from pre-transitional societies in which demographic regimes have been most thoroughly studied, summarizing what is known about their character. The nature and current status of homeostatic theories in demography and the institutional supports of pre-transitional regimes are considered. The implications of the findings on pre-transitional populations for transition theory are then discussed. The paper concludes with suggestions for ways in which studies of transition within a framework of homeostatic regimes could be developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a promising start some three decades ago, the application of micro-economic analysis to fertility studies has proved disappointing. It has not led to an increased understanding of fertility decisions nor to the policy insights which had been expected. This paper considers the reasons for this disappointment. It reviews briefly the development of the now dominant version of the economic approach to fertility analysis, the so-called "Chicago Model". It concludes that several basic conceptual and theoretical weaknesses of this approach have led it up a blind alley. The paper concludes with suggestions for new assumptions and approaches which may make the theory more relevant for policy programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In studies of the fertility of migrants in which the data are confined to the migrants only, estimation bias will normally appear in comparisons of childbearing before and after migration. The same issue arises in studies of union formation before and after first birth, marriage formation before and after home purchase, and in any other comparison of behaviour before and after an index event if one confines the study only to those who have experienced the index event. It is normally better to avoid analysis of behaviour before the index event because such analysis actually conditions on the later arrival of the index event. In this paper, we provide graphical and mathematical representations of this problem and show how one can get a meaningful (unconditional) comparison of behaviour before and after the index event provided the data contain enough information for both sub-periods. Otherwise, the analyst should refrain from making a comparison of this nature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a new method for estimating the effect of child mortality on the total fertility rate (TFR). The method is based on discrete-time survival models of parity progression that allow construction of a multivariate multidimensional life table of fertility with four dimensions: woman's age, parity, duration in parity, and number of previous child deaths. Additional socio-economic variables are included in the set of predictor variables in the underlying survival models of parity progression. The life table yields a replacement rate, which measures the effect of one additional child death on the TFR. The method is illustrated by applying it to three Indian National Family Health Surveys. Major findings are that dead children are incompletely replaced, and that the replacement rate rises as the TFR falls, reflecting women's increasing ability to control their fertility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1920 and 1940, fertility dropped below replacement level in many Western countries. In today's scholarly literature, the drop is usually explained as a temporary reaction to the exceptional conditions of the inter-war period. This paper confronts that interpretation with the interpretations offered by scholars writing between the wars. According to leading demographers of the time, low fertility was due not to war or economic crisis, but rather to processes that now tend to be associated with the Second Demographic Transition, including secularization, individualization, rising consumerism, and women's emancipation. Since these were seen as structural features of modernization, most inter-war scholars argued that subreplacement fertility would remain an obstinate feature of modern society for an extended period of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This paper examines the past transition from low to high fertility which, in Indonesia as elsewhere, preceded the return to lower birth rates. Data from two parts of the island of Sulawesi where fertility rose during the colonial period are used to explain both why it rose, and why it was originally low. Economic conditions, it is argued, were the most important factors, affecting fertility via the supply of income and the demand for labour. Two schematic models of the 'first fertility transition' are proposed. In areas with low population densities and area-extensive forms of agriculture responsive to commercial stimuli, birth rates rose as the growth of commerce raised levels of prosperity, facilitated marriage, and undermined institutions such as debt-slavery which had previously acted to restrict marital fertility. In densely populated areas with labour-intensive agriculture and heavy state taxation in labour, fertility rose in response to demands for women's (and possibly child) labour that did not necessarily lead to gains in income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines causality and parameter instability in the long-run relationship between fertility and women's employment This is done by a cross-national comparison of macro-level time-series data from 1960 to 2000 for France, West Germany, Italy, Sweden, the UK, and the USA. By applying vector error correction models (a combination of Granger-causality tests with recent econometric time-series techniques) we find causality in both directions. This finding is consistent with simultaneous movements of both variables brought about by common exogenous factors such as social norms, social institutions, financial incentives, and the availability and acceptability of contraception. We find a negative and significant correlation until about the mid-1970's and an insignificant or weaker negative correlation afterwards. This result is consistent with a recent hypothesis in the demographic literature according to which changes in the institutional context, such as changes in childcare availability and attitudes towards working mothers, might have reduced the incompatibility between child-rearing and the employment of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars have argued that deliberate birth spacing may have played a role before and during the modern fertility transition. There are good historical and theoretical reasons for this view, but it has proved to be hard to demonstrate convincingly that birth intervals were in fact partly determined by attempts at deliberate fertility control. This paper suggests a method of securing evidence on the issue for married couples. The method is applied to three cohorts living in a Belgian town in the nineteenth century. The findings indicate that, even before the fertility transition, couples in the working class were controlling their fertility by deliberate spacing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the inconsistency that has appeared in studies of the effect of women's work on fertility in less developed countries has been attributed to the varying accessibility of employment in the modern sector. The analysis presented in this paper shows that continuity of work matters more than sector of work. It also confirms that, even in a setting of low contraceptive prevalence, increased fecundity associated with the less intense breastfeeding practices of working women do not result in shorter birth intervals. The influence of women's work on fertility control is likely to be underestimated if the effects of sporadic versus continuous work are conflated, or if fecundity differentials by work status are unmeasured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper seeks to identify common features in the fertility patterns of the English-speaking world and provide a model basis for comparison of fertility between countries and over time. Attention is focused on the heterogeneity within the fertility patterns of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States, similar to that reported earlier for the UK and the Irish Republic. The recent age-specific fertility patterns of these countries display a marked 'bulge' in fertility of women under age 25. A mixture model with two-component: Hadwiger functions provides a suitable fit. The heterogeneity thus suggested is shown to be related to differences in the timing of births by marital status, and its magnitude is related to the proportion of births outside marriage. Additionally, there is some evidence that, in the United States, and to a lesser extent in New Zealand, this heterogeneity in fertility patterns may be explained by ethnic differences in the timing and number of births. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the consequences of using different economic status proxies on the estimated impact of economic status and other determinants of fertility. Using micro survey data from Ghana and Peru, we find that the proxies for income that best predict fertility are a principal components score of the ownership of consumer durable goods and a simple sum of ownership of these durable goods, Furthermore, the choice of the proxy generally has a minor influence on the predicted effects of the control variables. We compare the results from using a restricted set of proxies, such as those available in the Demographic and Health Surveys, with the results obtained using a lengthier set of proxies. Our results suggest implications beyond fertility analyses by providing researchers with an awareness of the sensitivity of microanalyses to the treatment of economic status. Our results also suggest practical recommendations for the collection of survey data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decline of human fertility that occurred in Europe and North America in the nineteenth century, and elsewhere in the twentieth, remains a topic of debate largely because there is no accepted explanation for the event. This paper uses district-level data from Bavaria to study the correlates of the decline of fertility in that German kingdom in the nineteenth century, Bavaria's fertility transition was later and less dramatic than in other parts of Germany. Our results for Bavaria indicate that the European Fertility Project was right about the role of religion and secularization, but missed an important role for the economic and structural effects stressed by economic historians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1945, at the end of the Second World War, Albania had the highest fertility in Europe with an average of more than six live births per woman. However when Albania emerged from behind the 'olive curtain' in 1990, fertility had fallen to three children per woman, despite a pro-natalist environment and in the virtual 'absence of Contraception and abortion. Nevertheless, after five decades, Albania's position at the top of the European fertility league remains unchanged. This paper documents the fertility transition in Albania during the period 1950-90 and places the demographic results in the context of recent socioeconomic and cultural change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its inception in 1974, the South African family planning programme has been widely believed to be linked with white fears of growing black numbers. The programme has been repeatedly attacked by detractors as a programme of social and political control. Yet, in spite of the hostile environment, black women's use of services has steadily increased. Using historical and anthropological evidence, this paper delineates the links between the social and political context of racial domination and individual fertility behaviour. It is argued that the quantitative success of the family planning programme is rooted in social and economic shifts conditioning reproductive authority and fertility decision-making. State policies of racial segregation and influx control, ethnic 'homeland' politics, and labour migration of men transformed opportunities and constraints for black women and men, and altered local and household expectations of childbearing. Women came to manage their own fertility as they increasingly found themselves in precarious social and economic circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Korea, total fertility declined from 6.0 in 1960 to 1.6 in 1990, in spite of a strong preference for male offspring. This paper addresses the notion that son preference hinders fertility decline, and examines the effects of patriarchal relations and modernization on fertility using the 1991 Korea National Fertility and Family Health Survey. It was found that women who have a son are less likely to have another child, and that women with a son who do progress to have another child, take longer to conceive the subsequent child. This pattern prevailed for women of parity one, two, and three, and became more pronounced with higher parity. A multivariate analysis showed that preference for male offspring, patriarchy, and modernization are all strong predictors of second, third, and fourth conceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the question of whether higher governmental support for families has a positive effect on fertility by encouraging parents to have more children. The analysis is based on data for 22 industrialized countries and covers the period 1970 to 1990. Data are analysed using a fixed-effect econometric model with the sum of age-specific fertility rates as the dependent variable. The results show that family allowances have a positive and significant effect on fertility, while maternity leave benefits have no significant effect. Increasing the value of family allowances by 25 per cent would result in an 0.6 per cent increase in fertility level in the short run. In the long run this effect would be of the order of 4 per cent, or about 0.07 children per woman on average. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is argued in this paper that "perceptions" about the determinants of fertility and of fertility decline can be "politicized" by various special interest groups; that is, these perceptions can be used to push for policies and interventions which often have an ambiguous relationship to actual fertility, but are important because they already appear on the political agenda of these groups. Such politicization is facilitated by the near-universal consensus that fertility decline is a legitimate goal in the developing world, by the increasing evidence that there can be no grand theory of fertility decline, and by the willingness of scholars to attach a policy significance to all their findings. Two examples of such politicization in India are presented, one of which has a socially beneficial impact, whilst the other is potentially disruptive, to illustrate that such politicization is not without its dangers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the reply of the author and co-authors to an article about the analysis of differences in the fertility patterns between national populations and over time. In their comments to our paper Osona and Kohler make a number of interesting and potentially helpful points. While their comments do not, in general, appear to be in conflict with our opinions, we are concerned that they have misunderstood one specific point. In their first section, on the analytical relationship between Hadwiger parameters and demographic measures, the authors re-present some known results. Those results, of course, were not the essential point of our paper, which was concerned primarily with the analysis of differences in fertility patterns. The functions were fitted in order to gain understanding of the differences in the patterns between countries and periods. The correspondences between variables to which they refer were used in order to investigate the effects of departures from the models in cases of distorted distributions. In their section dealing with reparameterization the authors propose an alternative to our presentation of the Hadwiger mixture model. Their explicit interpretation of the Hadwiger parameters as the total fertility, the mean age at childbearing, and the variance of the fertility schedule is possibly a step forward for the use of the model in demography.