Social Policy and Recent Fertility Change in Sweden.

This article focuses on the social policy and recent fertility change in Sweden. In Sweden, as in many other industrialized countries, the period total fertility rate stopped declining in the late 1970s and started rising in the mid-1980s. However, Swedish period fertility never fell to the very low levels reached and still largely maintained by a number of other European countries, such as West Germany, Switzerland, Italy, or Austria, and it has risen swiftly to a level that by the standards of the last quarter century is high for a developed country. Current Swedish fertility trends are consistent with a general mild adjustment toward more moderate demographic behavior than was the case in the recent past. Demographic developments in Sweden have often been a precursor of more general trends; thus what has happened recently in that country may indicate what lies ahead for other populations. In Sweden fertility at ages 15-19 fell through the 1970s and has remained at a low level of about 11 births per thousand women through the subsequent period of fertility increase.