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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]

At the theoretical level, the paper has two aims: to develop a three-country migration model and to incorporate British emigration schemes of the 1920s into it. The model is tested on data of U.K. emigration to Canada, the U.S.A. and Australia from 1920 to 1936. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the fertility patterns and differentials among various immigrant groups in Australia. Like two other major countries of immigration, the United States and Canada, Australia has eliminated ethnicity as a criterion for the screening of potential immigrants. Fertility ratios standardized by age and marital status suggest that the overall fertility of foreign-born women was higher in both 1971 and 1976; however, some evidence of convergence towards an Australian norm was found. Four distinct patterns of fertility were noted. In two of them, Arab and South European, marital fertility was substantially higher but non-marital fertility quite low. The Northwest European pattern was closest to that of the native-born; however, in the East European pattern fertility was lowest. Component analysis showed that most of the differences between the total fertility rate of Australians and those of the other groups reflect the significantly higher marital fertility rates and proportions married among the foreign born groups. Overall fertility of immigrant women was higher in both 1971 and 1976 than for Australian-born women. But their marital fertility was similar and their non-marital fertility lower than that of their Australian counterparts. The discrepancies in these findings occur because proportionately more immigrants were married than non-immigrants.