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The study presented in this paper is an examination of the long-term impact of genocide during the period of the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–79) in Cambodia. The very high and selective mortality of the period had a major impact on the population structure of Cambodia. Fertility and marriage rates were both very low under the Khmer Rouge, but recovered immediately after the regime's collapse. Because of the shortage of eligible men, the age and education differences between partners tended to decline. The period also had a lasting impact on the educational attainment of the population. The school system collapsed during the period and therefore individuals—especially men—who were of school age at the time have a lower educational attainment than those from the preceding and subsequent birth cohorts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to describe trends in fertility and fertility change in the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the years 1968-1992, with a particular focus on the recent rise in fertility. The paper is based primarily on vital registration data. The findings show that the fertility transition has been well underway in the West Bank since 1985, with a lull during the Intifada period. No indication of a fertility transition in the Gaza Strip was found. An examination of the age pattern of fertility reveals that Palestinian fertility has been increasingly shifting toward younger ages, with a particular concentration in the age group 15-24 during the Intifada period. A decomposition analysis of the fertility rates shows that the recent rise in fertility is essentially due to changes in marital structure, but also to increased fertility within marriage among younger women. No evidence of increased fertility among older women is found. Some implications of the findings are discussed. [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]

In this paper we study the effects of short-term fluctuations in indicators of economic well-being on selected demographic response such as births, marriages and deaths at age intervals in eleven Latin American countries between 1910 and 1990. We use conventional distributed lag models to assess the magnitude and direction of effects and test a variety of hypotheses some of which have been posed to hold in Western Europe and others that are more specific and tailored to the Latin American context. We also compare the magnitude and direction of effects obtained among these countries with those obtained for preeindustrial Europe and uncover the existence of broadly similar patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Part I of this paper (published in the previous issue) we outlined the major contrasts in demographic experience between almost all areas of Scotland and most of England during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We also demonstrated the existence of significant regional differences within Scotland. In Part II. interpretations are offered for these various contrasts in experience. Four Scottish regional case studies are examined, each of which shows a different combination of nuptiality, marital fertility and out-migration. In studying each case, stress is laid on the ways in which the prevailing demographic regime, if it is examined as an interrelated whole, can be seen as involving highly appropriate adjustments to the ecological, economic, and institutional contexts of the region. In this approach, `innovation' aspects of the fertility decline are therefore played down: instead, for some parts of the country in particular, continued very high fertility among those who married is seen as a highly rational response to particular local social and economic situations which also encouraged very low nuptiality, and moderate or high levels of out-migration. The much lower nuptiality in Scotland compared to England is explained in part by reference to constraints on access to housing and the very limited availability of any support from the Poor Law, and in part through limited economic opportunities in a more slowly growing economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dowries in most regions of South Asia have steadily become larger over the last 40 years, causing widespread destitution among families with daughters to be married. This paper attempts to investigate the reasons behind dowry `inflation' with data on marriage transactions and other individual and household information from six villages in south- central India, and from the Indian census. It is found that a 'marriage squeeze' caused by population growth which resulted in a surplus of younger women in the marriage market, has played an important role in the increase in dowries. Other factors that increase the size of dowries include differences in the land holdings of the parental households, and residence in regions in the more northerly parts of India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demographic projection models describe the development over time of the population in terms of events. A consistency problem arises if projected numbers of events are required to satisfy certain constraints: the consistency problem can be seen as a generalization of the well-known two-sex problem in nuptiality models. This paper presents a very general characterization of consistency problems, using matrix notation, as well as a slightly less general algorithm to solve them. The preferred specification of the objective function to be minimized by the algorithm leads to a solution that can be interpreted as a generalization of the harmonic-mean approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The orphanhood method has proved an important source of adult mortality estimates in countries without adequate vital registration systems, but produces rather out-of-date results and is prone to under-reporting of orphanhood at young ages (the 'adoption effect'). In this paper we investigate whether a brief and straightforward supplementary question about the timing of the deaths of women's parents relative to first marriage can be used to study these problems. Coefficients are presented for estimating adult mortality from maternal and paternal orphanhood before and since marriage. Estimation of the time location of the results is discussed, and the methods are applied to data from Morocco, Burundi and Uganda. The results are promising. Data on orphanhood since marriage reflect more recent mortality than lifetime data and are less subject to the adoption effect. When it is accurately reported, information on orphanhood before marriage yields a series of mortality estimates that extends back at least 30 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In France, as in many other Western European countries, attitudes and behaviour regarding marriage have changed drastically over the past 20 years. One of the major changes has been the increasing propensity to begin one's matrimonial career outside marriage: two-thirds of first unions begun in 1983-85 were outside marriage. A special survey was carried out at the end of 1985 to collect detailed information on life-courses for a sample of 4,091 women and men aged between 21 and 44 years. In a previous paper, we focused on the characteristics and on the outcome of first unions,¹ with no account of interactions with fertility, which will be the guideline of the present paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a result of recent changes in marriage behaviour, it is no longer possible to study this subject solely by using information from vital registration and censuses. For instance, in France two-thirds of first unions are not legal marriages, and one-third of first births take place outside marriage. It is, therefore, necessary to collect individual detailed marital histories, such as those that were obtained in the Enquiry on Family Life towards the end of 1985. In the present paper, we consider the conditions under which first unions take place (type of union and age of parties), as well as their eventual outcome (marriage or separation). Successive cohorts of first unions after 1968 have experienced different histories: the transition from the traditional model to the present one has been characterized by discontinuities. In the most recent cohorts (1980-82), marriage is still the most frequent outcome of first unions that began outside marriage (50 per cent marry within the first three years of the union); pre-marital cohabitation does not appear to have affected the stability of marriage, and altogether one-fifth of first unions are broken within ten years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The net reproduction ratio (NRR) is a useful measure of the growth of a population from one generation to the next. Like the expectation of life, it is based on a stable or Malthusian population and is not influenced by the actual population structure. Its use in this country was first advocated by Robert Kuczynski in the 1930s and, despite some reservations, it is still published for this and many other countries, particularly in the United Nations Demographic Yearbook. Kuczynski attributed its origin to Richard Boeckh, who, at the relevant time, around 1890, was Director of the Statistical Office of the City of Berlin. Boeckh discusses his data and the problems met. He estimates, for example, that two-ninths of all illegitimate children are subsequently legitimized by the marriage of their parents. In a census they are reported as legitimate, producing an inconsistency between census and registration data. He checks reliability, for example by showing that the decrease in the number of marriages with successive numbers of children is regular. At that time, no details of mother's age at birth were collected at registration in England. For this reason, Farr starts with Norwegian data as preferable to those from Scotland, Sweden or Denmark where this information was also available.

Previous research on the relationship between extended family residence and fertility has produced conflicting findings. In the present paper, we avoid a major shortcoming of past work by focusing on residence and fertility at a given stage of the life-cycle, i.e. the stage following first marriage. Results show that residence with husband's parents reduces age at marriage. Residence with wife's parents shows no such consistent effect. No evidence was found to support the claim that extended family residence consistently affects the length of the interval between marriage and the first birth. These findings are consistent across four cultural/ethnic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research, while drawing attention to the serious dearth of information, has given new emphasis to the importance of marriage as a population determinant in pre-industrial England. This paper sets out the results of a study of nuptiality in three south Warwickshire parishes between the late seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries. It looks first at a number of serious problems which beset the subject in the Midlands. Bearing these in mind, certain tentative conclusions were put forward about the customary age at first marriage prevailing within this locality. It appeared that until the third quarter of the eighteenth century the mean for both sexes remained above 273 years, and was associated with low bridal pregnancy and illegitimacy rates. The latter increased during the period 1750-75. and were probably accompanied after 1770 by a secular fall in the age at marriage. The changes were found in both market-town and village, they began before reliance on outdoor relief became widespread, and were more noticeable amongst brides than grooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European countries differ considerably in their marriage patterns. The study presented in this paper describes these differences for the 1990s and attempts to explain them from a macro-level perspective. We find that different indicators of marriage (i.e., marriage rate, age at marriage, divorce rate, and prevalence of unmarried cohabitation) cannot be seen as indicators of an underlying concept such as the 'strength of marriage'. Multivariate ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analyses are estimated with countries as units and panel regression models are estimated in which annual time series for multiple countries are pooled. Using these models, we find that popular explanations of trends in the indicators - explanations that focus on gender roles, secularization, unemployment, and educational expansion - are also important for understanding differences among countries. We also find evidence for the role of historical continuity and societal disintegration in understanding cross-national differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes core innovations in the strategy of research on demographic behaviour. One aim is a shift of attention away from events and towards a focus on dynamic processes and their interplay: away from a preoccupation with marriage and divorce, births, deaths, migrations, and household structure towards a broader perspective that takes account of partnership and intimacy, parenthood, potential and well-being, position in society and space, and personal ties. Another aim is a much closer engagement with genetics, neuroscience, psychology, and behavioural economics. A third aim is a strategy that pays more attention to pathways within the individual, to the processes entailed when the individual interacts with various contexts, and to progressions that involve the interplay of the pathways and processes through the life course. These shifts of emphasis, which have already begun to occur, require a systematic reassessment of priorities for research on demographic behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The model proposed in this paper combines a logistic regression model and a Weibull regression model for the analysis of current-status data. This joint model allows a simultaneous estimation of two sets of effects on the covariates: one on the probability that the event occurs (also known as quantum) and the other on the timing of the event. Thus, the model can be seen either as an extension of a survival-analysis model for use with current-status data where a survival fraction is added in order explicitly to take into account the possibility that the event may never occur, or as an extension of survival analysis with long-term survivors to the analysis of current-status data. As an illustrative application we apply our model to a study of nuptiality in seventeenth-century Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been demonstrated for many pre-industrial populations that the age at marriage, or marriage duration, influences age-specific marital fertility but the reason for this remains unclear. Among the several mechanisms that may be responsible, the following are often cited: secondary sterility or increased sub fecundity associated with parity; declining coital frequency; the age difference between the spouses; and, importantly, parity-dependent fertility control. If the latter mechanism were partly responsible for the marriage-duration effect in pre-transition populations, it would contradict the concept of the modern fertility transition as the evolution (or revolution) from parity-independent to parity-dependent fertility. The study presented in this paper investigates the relative importance of these alternative explanations. The application of multivariate Poisson regression to the fertility data from two birth cohorts in the Belgian city of Leuven shows that a linearly declining or even concave age-specific fertility pattern, disaggregated by age at marriage, does not imply parity-dependent fertility limitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a study of changes in marriage patterns among the Jewish population of Israel over nearly 40 years. Using data from four Israeli Censuses spanning experience from the late 1950s to the mid 1990s, we employ Schoen's harmonic mean model in a multivariate framework to consider, simultaneously, changes over time in age-specific marriage rates by ethnicity and educational attainment. Our analyses point to a number of clear and interesting findings: (1) an increasingly positive association between marriage and educational attainment, especially for women; (2) the continuing central role of ethnicity in mate selection, despite important declines in ethnic endogamy over the period; (3) a decrease in-the prominence of unions of 'exchange'; (4) some evidence of increasing 'block' endogamy among Jews of Asian and African origin; and (5) a small increase in educational homogamy over the period. Interpretations and implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops multivariate models to describe homogamy or, more generally, marriage preferences, for corresponding characteristics of brides and grooms. The purpose of these models is to obtain interpretable measures of the degree of homogamy (or marriage preference) on one dimension and to adjust these measures for homogamy on other dimensions. The models are applied to a sample of marriages in Montevideo, Uruguay, with pairs of corresponding variables for the brides and grooms. The analysis estimates the unadjusted and adjusted levels of homogamy on previous marital status, age, education, religion, and location. Homogamy on location, or propinquity, is the single most important variable. Previous marital status and age describe the readiness or eligibility to marry and are associated in their effect on homogamy. Education and religion describe vertical and horizontal differentiation of marriage partners, respectively. The multivariate analysis verifies that these dimensions are largely independent of each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the effect of previous cohabitation on marital stability among the 1958 British birth cohort. Prospective data from the National Child Development Study are used to investigate the way in which family background factors and early lifecourse experiences, including cohabitation, affect the risk of first marriage dissolution by age 33. Discrete time logistic regression hazards models are used to analyse the risk of separation in the first eight years of marriage. Many socio-economic and family background factors are found to act through more intermediate determinants, such as age at marriage and the timing of childbearing, to affect the risk of separation. Previous cohabitation with another partner and premarital cohabitation are both associated with higher rates of marital breakdown. The effect of premarital cohabitation is attenuated but remains significant once the characteristics of cohabitors are controlled, and cannot be explained by the longer time spent in a partnership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although sociologists, demographers, and economists are generally agreed that economic independence enhances the likelihood that men will marry, there is disagreement concerning its effect on women. The view that economic independence weakens women's incentive to marry has probably been the most influential, although it has been subjected to few rigorous empirical tests with individual-level data. In the present paper we examine the predictors of forming a first cohabiting union, of progressing from this union to marriage, and of marrying without previously cohabiting by applying hazard regression to event-history data from the 1992 Swedish Family Survey, supplemented by earnings data extracted from the national taxation register. We test a battery of measures that reflect people's past, current, and potential attachment to the labour market. We find that the correlates of union formation for women are largely indistinguishable from the correlates of union formation for men, and that far from being less likely than other women to cohabit or to marry, women with a greater degree of economic self-sufficiency are more likely to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the influence of parental preferences for grandchildren on young adults' entry into cohabitation and marriage. We also consider the influence of young adults' own fertility preferences on their cohabitation and marriage behaviour. We develop a theoretical framework explaining why these childbearing attitudes influence young people's cohabitation and marriage behaviour. The results show that the childbearing preferences of young women and their mothers affect their choice between cohabitation and marriage, so that wanting many children increases the likelihood of choosing marriage. Young men whose mothers want them to have many children enter any type of co-residential union, either marriage or cohabitation, at a much higher rate than men whose mothers want them to have fewer children. Our results also provide insights into the childbearing behaviour of cohabitating couples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With more than 22 million inhabitants, Uzbekistan is the most populous of the Central Asian republics of the former USSR. Using data from a retrospective survey conducted in 1992 among women of reproductive age, the paper examines fertility trends and determinants during the twentieth century. The analysis shows that the absence of a government-supported birth control programme and the strong pro-natalist policies of the Soviet authorities during most of the century did not affect either the onset, nor the progress of the fertility transition. The results indicate, however, that the social development programmes undertaken by the Soviet government did play a very active part in the transition as shown by the impact of education on reproductive behaviour, as well as on the very specific contraceptive mix adopted by the population after the mid- 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have conducted surveys specifically designed to study the autonomy/power of women in two Nepali settings. Setting I is in the hills, 75 kilometers southwest of Kathmandu; Setting II is in the tarai (plains) a few kilometers from the border with India. Previously the authors have shown that women in the hill setting have much more autonomy/power than women in the tarai setting. In this paper we focus on aspects of marriage formation and post-marital kin contact and their possible effects on women" s autonomy/power. Specifically, we measure women's autonomy/power with indicators of women's freedom of movement and power in making household decisions. We assess whether these indicators are influenced by aspects of mate selection and kinship, including patrilocal post-marital residence, arranged marriages, emphasis on the virginity of brides, village exogamy, dowry, and contact with natal kin. We show that marriage regimes differ substantially in the two settings. While marriages in both settings are usually arranged, some love marriages are reported in Setting I. Furthermore, the mean age at ceremonial marriage in the tarai (Setting II) is about 11.5 years compared with 14.5 in the hills (Setting I). In some cases, we find that individual-level indicators of mate selection or kinship are associated with individual-level measures of women's autonomy. But these associations cannot account for the dramatically different degrees of autonomy in these settings. Such findings do not imply that kin relations and marriage formation are irrelevant for women's autonomy/power. But they do challenge the version of these arguments that isolates marriage/kinship effects at the individual level. Autonomy, while measurable at the individual level, is determined primarily by broad-based institutional arrangements and associated community social control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demographers, as early as Malthus, have assumed that the preventive checks, delayed marriage and celibacy, were absent in traditional China. In this paper on the Qing (1644-1911) imperial lineage, we demonstrate that, instead, there may have been a different, more `modern' preventive check: fertility control within marriage. Marital fertility of lineage couples during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was low to moderate. Such low fertility was the product of three behavioural mechanisms: late starting, early stopping and, most significantly, long spacing. Couples apparently regulated their fertility according to their economic resources and the sex of their surviving children. Moreover, they did so, we suggest, by regulating their coital frequency. Deliberate fertility control, in other words, was already within the - calculus of conscious choice' for some Chinese well before this century. The speed of contemporary sinitic fertility transitions may accordingly be attributed to the fact that they did not require a change in attitudes, only the diffusion of new incentives and effective technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Age-at-marriage estimates from family reconstitutions may be biased downward when they are based only on marriages of people who continue to live in their parish of birth, because when the probability of migrating rises with age, younger people are selected in preference to older ones. Micro-simulations show that the bias can have dramatic effects. In this paper French-Canadian data are used to investigate the importance of the bias and to verify empirically the micro-simulation results. Although a high proportion of people moved between birth and marriage, the bias had virtually no effect, given the specific characteristics of the migrations. If one cannot avoid discussing the timing of migration before marriage, when measuring age at first marriage using only data on "stayers" it is just possible that in most settings, it is the same for those who lived in their parish of birth, and those who had moved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I comment on the unexpected finding from primary and secondary data that, although the age at effective marriage is significantly lower in North India compared to the southern part of the country, mother's age at first birth is very similar in both regions. That is, the first birth interval is much longer in the North. Standard socio-economic and biological reasons for this difference are found to provide incomplete and unsatisfactory explanations - instead, the longer first birth interval in North India is explained in terms of the marriage and kinship patterns in this area which lead to (i) lower frequency of intercourse and (ii) long periods of abstinence when the wife visits her parental home. Both these factors operate primarily during the first years of marriage and result in a convergence of the ages at first birth in the two regions. The argument, therefore, questions the correctness of policy prescriptions which equate early marriage with an early start of childbearing, and seek to control the latter by changing the former. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper growth rates, marriage patterns, fertility, mortality, population composition and urbanization in England and her American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are compared. The purpose is to see whether the colonists perpetuated English demographic patterns in the New World, or whether new environments led to new behaviour. The results are derived from numerous local studies, often based on family reconstitution. Taking into account regional variations in America, colonial demographic patterns were quite different from those in the mother country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to clarify factors affecting the timing of marriage and pregnancy of Japanese women, this paper examines the timing of marriage, the age at which women first met the men they eventually married, the time that elapsed between first meeting and engagement, between engagement and marriage, and between engagement and first conception for the 1937-1955 birth cohorts. Women resorting to an arranged marriage showed a large increase in the age at first meeting as well as marriage age, while women marrying on a love-match basis did not. Supporting the hypothesis that there are three stages of Japanese women's attitude towards marriage, which affect the pattern of time schedule to marriage, it is found that women with a larger probability of career-seeking are likely to have a higher age at first meeting and a longer time between engagement and marriage even in love-match cases. This study suggests that a large proportion of women preferred their marriage to be a love match, but only a minority were career- orientated in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to disentangle simultaneous demographic effects on divorce probabilities by means of age-period-cohort-type models. A multi-dimensional analysis of divorce probabilities in Finland between 1948 and 1984 is presented by period, marriage cohort, and duration, and for the year 1984 by age, age at marriage, and duration. Effects of order of marriage, number of children, and age of youngest child are also studied. Finland is one of the few countries in which such data are available from a population register. For the changes between 1948 and 1984, period effects turn out to be much more important for the increase in divorce than cohort effects. As regards period analysis for 1984, a quite surprising pattern appears: neither a specific duration of marriage (usually risk is highest at durations of between four and six years), nor a young age at marriage present the major risk factors, but young age itself. If this pattern were also to hold for other populations, it suggests the need for a major change in divorce analysis and registration of divorce data, giving less emphasis to duration or age at marriage, and more to age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines marriage patterns in four Balkan countries during the course of the demographic transition. It is shown by analysis of the available data that cultural and institutional factors, such as family type, kinship structure or religious doctrines, alone, cannot explain adequately all the features of nuptiality in the region. Without denying the importance of the cultural-institutional' approach, it was found necessary to expand it by taking into account the distinctive historical and developmental context in a given country or region. It is argued that the relative importance of marriage postponement (and celibacy), birth control, and out-migration, as parts of a complex system of `adjustments' to sustained population growth, was determined by the rate of this growth, as well as by the pace of socio-economic development and a number of other factors (including institutional and cultural ones). The experience of the Balkan countries is explored with this assumption as a background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges the widely held and influential view that the fertility transition is largely the consequence of changing parental demand for children brought about by changes in the economic costs and benefits entailed in childbearing. Using evidence from both historical and contemporary populations we argue that demand theories do not offer a plausible explanation of the fertility transition. Instead, we propose that ideational, rather than structural, economic change lies at the heart of the transition. In particular, we suggest that attitudes to birth control, broadly defined, play a crucial role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The modernization of reproductive behaviour in the Netherlands was late and slow in comparison to other European countries. In this paper marital fertility (Ig) and nuptiality (Im) between 1850 and 1960 are described and analysed, in this way adding the Dutch case to the studies of the European Fertility Project. In the analysis a model is used in which economy, attitudes and infant mortality are the (clusters of) independent variables, and either Ig or Im is the dependent one. To avoid multicollinearity the interdependencies of the explaining factors are eliminated. An analysis is made of both the level and the development of fertility and nuptiality. The model used fits the data well, and the distinction between level and development is of great importance. If analyzed statistically the variance in Im and Ig between the provinces can for the most part be explained by the attitudinal factor, while when analyzing the changes in nuptiality and marital fertility the economic factor has the strongest explanatory power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper changes in the relative importance of the proximate determinants of fertility, as modernization increases, are analysed Educational attainment and type of place of current residence are used as indicators of modernization. We concentrate on the three most important proximate variables: marriage, contraception and breastfeeding, and the analysis is performed on 29 World Fertility Survey countries. Bongaarts's multiplicative model is used for the analysis but the primary data tapes make it possible to construct more refined estimates of the three indices than is usually possible. The patterns of the indices among the two sets of socio-economic sub-groups are considered, as well as the interrelationships of the indices. Fertility differences among the sub-groups are also decomposed to assess the contribution of the separate proximate determinants to sub-group variations in fertility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A In this paper variations in marital fertility and nuptiality in 48 Hungarian provinces over the period 1880-1910 are investigated in order to test competing hypotheses about the socioeeconomic and cultural sources of the European demographic transition. Models are constructed to compare three explanations: (1) the conventional hypothesis of demographic transition emphasizing infant mortality, urbanization, education and modernization. (2) the recent re-interpretation including cultural and ethnic factors; and (3) an hypothesis drawn from the literature on contemporary demographic transitions which emphasizes poverty and economic inequality. These three models are tested and compared through multivariate statistical analysis, using statistics for four census periods. The results show that neither the conventional model nor the revision explains which cultural and ethnic factors adequately explain differentials and changes in Hungarian fertility during the period of transition. The consideration of economic variables that represent the welfare of the mass of households substantially improves the explanation Consequently, it is suggested that explanations of demographic transitions during the nineteenth century that omit the influence of economic disparities between households and the economic welfare of low-income households are incomplete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the introduction to this paper we set out four hypotheses we think are central to Easterlin's theory of contemporary population cycles: that the income prospects of small birth cohorts are better in early adult life than those of larger cohorts; that cohort taste and income aspirations are formed in adolescence and reflect parental income levels rather than those members of the cohort are likely to experience after entering the labour force; that the wider gaps between aspirations and incomes this implies for larger cohorts will constrain their fertility relative to that of smaller cohorts; and that through these effects persistent fertility cycles may be set up after an initial period of unusually small or large birth cohorts. In the first part of our analysis we considered whether cohort-specific fertility behaviour could be identified in American historical experience. Our finding, which may have been evident in the fertility patterns of Figure 2, was essentially negative: the fit of period-focused fertility regressions was consistently found to be better than that of cohort-focused regressions. In the latter, coefficients were usually of the wrong sign. Evidently, cohorts have tended not to be particularly consistent in their fertility behaviour through life, and if long cycles are established they are unlikely to be of the Easterlin type. Looking at possible Easterlin patterns in the timing of births, we confronted first the problem of finding a satisfactory empirical translation for the relative income concept. Owing to the substantial fluctuations that occur in yearly incomes, we found we could construct a variety of relative income indexes with little consistency between them. None fit fertility patterns very convincingly. It may be that highly aggregated measures cannot provide an adequate test, but so far that is all that has been offered. In any event the model has also seemed to us to be suspect on intuitive grounds. The young surely do l!now that in early adult life their incomes will not match those of their parents, and it may demand a great measure of acuity on their part to sense that the differential is wider or narrower for themselves than for their older siblings or associates,especially as their incomes will be rising rapidly at the time they are attempting the assessment. From I this perspective, the evaluation Easterlin assumes might be far too subtle to account for fertility declines of the magnitude that have occurred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence for a variety of Asian countries suggests that a common evolutionary pattern in these nations before their modem fertility transitions. Natural fertility improved, infant mortality declined, and simultaneously the age at marriage of women rose. In this paper this evolution is documented for Japan. An hypothesis - a life cycle model of fertility - which accounts for this phenomenon is formulated and evidence to support the thesis is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper a method for decomposing rural-urban fertility differences into separate differences in nuptiality and marital fertility is developed. This technique is applied to national and provincial statistics for two countries, Japan and Sweden. It is shown that there are some features of rural-urban differences which hold for both countries, but it is also demonstrated that because the Japanese and Swedish fertility transitions were markedly dissimilar, there are salient contrasts in the relation between the magnitude and composition of the rural-urban differences and the stage reached in each country during its fertility transition.

We explore trends in first-union formation in Bulgaria from 1960, using data from the national Gender and Generations Survey of 2004. We analyse jointly the transition into cohabitation and directly into marriage. The standardized marriage rate falls dramatically from the early 1980s; the corresponding rate of entry into cohabitation has already increased from the early 1960s but (surprisingly) falls moderately toward the end of our period. Cohabitation also tends to last progressively longer in more recent periods. The analysis shows that a pregnancy leads to a dramatic increase in the rate of both kinds of union formation: the increase is by a factor of almost 20 for marriage formation and about 10 for entry into cohabitation, ceteris paribus. Our findings suggest that, in Bulgaria at least, some manifestations of the Second Demographic Transition can be detected as early as the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we conduct descriptive aggregate analyses to revisit the relationship of low and lowest-low period fertility to cohort fertility and key fertility-related behaviour such as leaving the parental home, marriage, and women's labour force participation. Our analyses show that the cross-country correlations in Europe between total fertility and the total first marriage rate, the proportion of extramarital births, and the labour force participation of women reversed during the period from 1975 to 1999. By the end of the 1990s there was also no longer evidence that divorce levels were negatively associated with fertility levels. We argue that lowest-low fertility has been particularly associated with a 'falling behind' of cohort fertility at higher birth orders and later ages. From these analyses we conclude that the emergence of lowest-low fertility during the 1990s was accompanied by a disruption or even a reversal of many well-known relationships that have been used to explain cross-country differences in fertility patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The data for this study come from Matlab, a rural area of Bangladesh, where a continuous registration of demographic events has been maintained by the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh since 1966. A total of 11,951 first marriages of Muslims that took place in the area between 1975 and 1987 were followed until the end of 1989, to examine the relationship between parental marriage breakdown and survival of first live-born children. The impact of divorce on survival of children during infancy and childhood was examined, using hazard analysis. Other independent variables included age of mother at birth, and mother's education, year of birth, sex of children, and residence at the time of childbirth. It is shown that the net odds of death among children of divorced mothers in infancy and childhood were respectively 3.2 and 1.4 times higher than those of mothers whose marriages continued. The paper also discusses the possible mechanisms which link divorce and child survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many investigators have found that divorce risks decrease as you move from groups with little educational or social capital to groups with more. This negative educational gradient fits with the notion that people with more education are better at selecting spouses and better at making a marriage work. Other investigators have found a positive gradient, often in populations where the situation is dominated by the individual's ability to handle the divorce process and to cope with the economic and other problems that follow in the wake of a divorce. The sign of the educational gradient in divorce risks seems to depend on the balance between countervailing influences. Information about the gradient over a few educational levels is about as much as you can expect to get from the interview data of a normal-sized general survey. With access to the data from a full-coverage system of the population and educational registers of a sizeable population like that of Sweden, educational effects can be studied in much greater detail. We begin to tap this source in the present paper. When we do, the educational gradient in divorce risks turns out to be too slippery a basis for the general theories that have been developed around it so far, at least in a population where it is reasonably easy to get a divorce and where the hurtful consequences to the divorcees are more limited than elsewhere. There has been no uniform relation between educational level and divorce risk of Swedish women at the various educational levels during the 1970s and 1980s; developments in recent decades in Swedish first-marriage divorce risks have been much more favourable to the more highly educated than to women with less education, and the result is that the educational gradient has become negative as we leave the 1980s. The educational gradient changed sign correspondingly between cohorts born in the mid-1940s and cohorts from the mid-1960s. In a society such... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two interesting features emerge from this study of fertility behaviour in Punjab. First, it brings out the common features of peasant life and demographic behaviour found in this developing-country setting and in historical Europe. As in much of Europe, marriage was regulated to adjust to the availability of land and other resources. It is interesting to note that the operation of this `nuptiality valve' was quite consistent with a system of joint families and partible inheritance. Secondly, the findings suggest that we need to re-define what we understand to be the features of socio-economic development which are crucial for fertility decline. Fertility began to decline steadily in this part of Punjab as early as 1940, at a time when the society was overwhelmingly agrarian, illiterate, and infant mortality was high with no access to modern contraceptive technology, as in historical Europe. The onset of the decline was brought about by development interventions which stabilized fluctuations in crop yields and mortality, thus radically improving stability of people's expectations. This study also points out the inapplicability of Mamdani's theories of fertility behaviour to the people he studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The population decline of the Parsis of India has been the subject of a number of demographic studies. While descriptive statistical accounts provide some clues about the causes of the decline, they fail to assess systematically the cultural and historical factors that are basic for the decline. This paper identifies the relative roles of low nuptiality, low fertility, emigration, and intermarriage in that decline, and the particular aspects of Parsi cultural values and historical experiences that account for them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data from the 1911 Census of England and Wales are examined for evidence of family limitation early in marriage. It is shown that a substantial number of couples used birth control for 'spacing' as welt as for 'stopping fertility. Moreover 'spacing' of births appears to have been more widespread in districts in which women's employment opportunities were relatively good. In general, the results obtained do not fit with the Princeton view of the European fertility transition with its stress on parity-specific family limitation spreading in response to improvements in contraceptive information and technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sub-national and cross-national variations in the age difference between spouses are investigated with data from the World Fertility Survey relating to 29 developing countries. Substantial variation within and between countries is evident. Analysis suggests that the relative age of prospective spouses is a factor taken into account in the marriage market. Observed variation in the age difference, within and between countries, cannot be explained as the simple by-product of the random matching of independently determined distributions of men's and women's ages at marriage. Certain age differences are avoided, others chosen more frequently. Preferred age differences appear to differ in the societies studied, however, and this variation can be directly interpreted in terms of two sets of factors: kinship structure and women's roles. The analysis also suggests that demographic determinants of the age difference, in particular age constraints on the pool of possible matches, are of less importance in explaining societal variations than are social structural factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent article published in this journal "Population studies," F. J. Willekens present a mathematical theory for the construction of multi-state life tables and apply it to the study of marital status patterns in Belgium, in the year 1971.

It is informed that data on age at marriage contained in all World Fertility Surveys (WFS) have led to increasing interest in the analysis of nuptiality patterns. This task has been rendered somewhat easier by the dissemination of a computer software package "NUPTIAL" designed by the WFS central staff for the analysis of nuptiality data. The purpose of this article is to explore how best to estimate the co-variates of age at marriage and age at first birth. In this article, authors have analysed two models for estimating the co-variates of age at marriage and age at first birth. The results of this study presented in this article supports the idea that both the proportional hazards model and the other model in question can be fruitfully employed to estimate the co-variates of age at marriage and age at first birth, even among cohorts whose experience is incomplete. Both models closely replicate observed patterns of marriage and first birth. In addition, the incorporation of co-variates adds significant explanatory power to both models. However, since neither model emerges from this analysis as a better performer than the other, the choice of model in any individual case must be made in view of the following considerations: first, the proportional hazards model cannot be applied to data from a sample of ever-married women; second, the proportional hazards model is non-parametric and cannot be used to project the first-marriage or first-birth experience of a cohort whose members have yet to complete their period of marriageability or fecundity.

This article presents a study to find the average age at first marriage for women in mid-nineteenth century in England and Wales. For this study the 1861 Census was preferred to that of 1851 as it could he expected to be more accurate and as it deals with marriage behavior from the period for which comparison can he made with the Registrar General's figures for England and Wales as a whole. Results were also derived for the 1851 census which were generally very similar, except that mean age at marriage for virtually all counties was estimated as being slightly higher. A crude indicator of life expectancy by county for 1861 was obtained by calculating infant mortality from the Registrar General's Report. The Spearman rank order correlation coefficient between infant mortality and mean age at marriage was -0.58, not surprising, given the inverse association between urbanization and age at marriage. If this association was typical of earlier times, as seems probable, then this would have weakened the effect on population growth of falls in age at marriage, especially at the levels of mortality generally prevailing during the classic Industrial Revolution period. The patterns of association between urbanization, mortality and age at marriage seem to be consistent with the opinion expressed and Ireland that changes in age at marriage probably did not play a major role in generating population growth during the period before 1850.

Keyfitz has derived an elegant formula for estimating the ultimate size of an initially stable, crowing population that abruptly reduces its fertility to replacement level. Reduction of fertility is achieved by the rather unrealistic device of dividing the original age schedule of fertility rates by the net reproduction rate. Only the inertia of the age distribution is thus accounted for, but not that of the fertility schedule. The key idea of an abrupt imposition of a fixed regimen capable in the long run of generating zero population growth may be retained, but the regimen made more realistic. By elaborating the population setting, such disparate ZPG regimens as reduction of marital fertility by contraception, delayed and/or less universal marriage, raised mortality risks, or permanent net out-migration may be formulated. Convergence of the population to stationarity becomes a two-phase process: a primary adjustment period of changing fertility rates followed by a period of age adjustment. The present paper treats what happens when a fixed ZPG sterilization regimen, defined by a minimum age of sterilization γ and constant continuous risk φ of sterilization among unsterilized wives aged γ to β, is imposed abruptly (or else progressively over an interval T) upon an initially stable, growing population. Additional sources of residual growth are: (1) the nine- month lag in sterilization effect owing to pregnancy: (2) the more youthful pattern of child- bearing under sterilization: (3) the extra adjustment period (of length β-γ- 0.75) of changing fertility rates; and (4) any delays in exposing elements of the population to the sterilization regimen. Two questions are pursued. First, how important are the additional sources of residual growth? Secondly, how do their relative sizes vary as a function of the characteristics of the initial population? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]