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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.

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]

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]

This paper reviews and interprets recent demographic trends and prospects in the two Irelands, North and South. We discuss both the influence of religion on demographic behaviour, and the impact of demographic trends on the distribution by religion. In the Republic of Ireland, we show that the long-standing gap in marital fertility between Catholics and others had virtually disappeared by the 1980s. In Northern Ireland the gap is still there in the 1990s, though considerably reduced. However, estimates of its size hinge on how the significant proportion of non-respondents to the census question on religion are allocated. We identify some peculiarities of the non-respondent population which imply that it was more `Catholic' in 1991 than first reports suggested. The Catholic share of Northern Ireland's population may accordingly be larger -42 to 43 per cent - than previously thought. In both communities, the future of the Catholic share depends less on fertility than on migration patterns. [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]

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]

Stable population theory has recently been used to analyse the effects of changes in fertility and mortality on economic variables such as income per head. In this paper more general results are derived to describe the effects of changing vital rates on the variance and higher moments of the distribution of some age-dependent variable. Simple analytical expressions are derived which decompose the effects of changes in age structure into the effects on inter-cohort and intra-cohort variance. The results are easily applied to standard measures of the distribution of income. By combining the analytical results with actual age profiles of income and income variance from the United States and Brazil it is observed that both the magnitude and direction of the effects of population growth on measured inequality are sensitive to the specific age profiles used. The most surprising result is that the Brazilian age profiles suggest that higher growth rates may actually reduce measured inequality, although the effect is relatively small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on an interview study of contraceptive practice among a representative sample of 1,022 white married women in Johannesburg, South Africa. It was found that most of the couples have used contraception at some time during their married life, the highest use being among fecund couples. A high proportion of couples used contraceptives before their first pregnancy, and a very small proportion of fecund women never use any form of contraception at all during their married lives.

This paper analyzes regional data on human fertility from the 1940 Census of Peru. It is noted that the 1940 Census discloses marked fertility differentials between urban and rural areas which are accounted for in terms of a lower incidence of motherhood in urban areas. Further analysis by department shows that social and economic characteristics are often related in one way to the incidence of motherhood and in the opposite way to the fertility of mothers. The hypothesis is advanced that differential patterns of mating may account for variations, and that increasing urbanization and cultural integration of Indian-speaking Peruvians may produce increases in fertility in the short run.

In this paper, the effect of declining mortality upon marital status distributions and through them upon birth rates and other related measures are studied while holding other factors constant. This was done by considering a stable population with a gross reproduction rate of 3 and expectation of life at birth 30 years and comparing it with another stable population with expectation of life at birth 50 years and the same marital fertility rates. The use of stable population models was found convenient because they show the effects of different levels of fertility and mortality, without the disturbance arising from abnormalities in the age distributions.

A population's growth potential is significantly underestimated by conventional calculations of population momentum which assume an immediate drop to replacement level fertility. Here we assume that the growth rate of births linearly declines to zero over a specified time interval, and find simple and intuitively meaningful expressions for the size of the ultimate birth cohort and the resultant population momentum. In particular, we find that the increase in the number of births over the transition is equal to growth at the initial rate for half the time needed to attain a constant birth level. Thus our formula readily calculates the growth potential of a population under a gradual approach to stationarity without the need for a numerical projection. Calculations for actual and hypothetical populations are presented to show the demographic impact of such gradual approaches to zero growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a statistical analysis is made of the social and economic characteristics associated with the decline of marital fertility in Spain. Variables examined on a provincial basis are marriage patterns, marital fertility, and indices of industrialization, urbanization, and literacy. Cross-section and time-series analyses of the data do not indicate a strong association between fertility and indicators of development. Rural-urban differentials in marital fertility are small when examined by province.

Before the demographic transition in Thailand, fertility was high, but not uniformly so. As in other pre-transition settings, Thai fertility responded to pressures and opportunities created by socioeconomic structure and land availability. Drawing upon provincial data from the 1947 and 1960 censuses of Thailand, we find a strong 'frontier effect' on Thai fertility in the 1950s. Fertility was higher in sparsely settled frontier provinces and lower in provinces with higher population density relative to cultivatable land. This finding is robust and holds up with controls for agricultural employment, land quality, and the sex ratio (an indicator of sex-selective migration). The effect of population pressure lowers the likelihood of marriage and of marital fertility. The findings from Thailand are consistent with the research of Easterlin on the nineteenth century United States and with other pre-transition societies. We suggest how demographic transition theory might be broadened to include fertility dynamics in pre-transition societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attempts to demonstrate the dependence of fertility decline in the Third World on radical change have often depended on simplistic statistical analyses. Here some of the data used to explore the relationship between fertility, and land size and ownership, are re-examined. It is concluded that the land-fertility hypotheses of Stokes and Schutjer are not supported by the evidence, but that such analyses are inherently inconclusive and ambiguous. Instead, an understanding of the wider institutional context is called for. The Population Establishment - foreign and international donors supporting population programmes and research - recruits an intelligentsia to validate its activities. The philosophy of this intelligentsia is examined and rejected through an analysis of ideas it derives from the World Fertility Survey and the Matlab family planning project. It is concluded that the Establishment perpetuates rapid population growth by legitimizing unpopular and elitist governments, and by misleading them to believe that fertility decline can, indeed, occur in a political economy of inequality and injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family planning programmes, whether intentionally or not, do by their nature affect the birth rates of populations served. Since the birth rate in the absence of the programmes is not known, it is not possible to determine with certainty the dimensions of their fertility effects. This article presents preliminary results of a continuing study of pre- and post-acceptance natality rates among all new acceptors in the national family planning programme of Malaysia during 1967-1969. To explain the observed results, use has been made of auxiliary data sources. Differences in the fertility of acceptors compared with the general female population are discussed, particularly in terms of differences between these two groups in their age and racial composition. Amongst acceptors, differences in fertility patterns associated with different contraceptive methods accepted are discussed. The limitations inherent in a fertility study covering only three years are recognized, as is the need for continuation and further refinement of the present study.