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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.

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]

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]

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]

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.