Causes and consequences of the baby boom

Following up Easterlin’s arguments about the impact of cohort size on demographic issues, the paper aims to explore the implications of cohort size in the specific context of residential mobility. The research is based on the case of the inner city of Barcelona. There are two elements that make this case study relevant. Firstly, fertility decrease was extraordinary fast in Spain. That produced big size differences among cohorts born within a short period of time. Secondly, the intensity of residential mobility is low and very concentrated in the household formation ages. This characteristic emphasizes the importance of cohort size in terms of competition: after members of large cohorts have moved they no longer cause a strong pressure on the housing market.
The paper looks for differences in patterns of residential behavior between baby-boom and baby-bust cohorts in two main aspects: the timing of the movements and the territorial distribution within the Metropolitan Area of the individuals moving from the central city. According to the literature, large cohorts face greater competition than small cohorts in multiple aspects, among which the housing market. Thus, it is expected that boomers will move later and farther than smaller cohorts.

How the survival of children may affect the fertility behaviour of their mother? More directly could the lost of a child increase the fertility of his/her mother. This question is important in the study of the impact of the reduction of infant mortality for the fertility transition. Sardinian population that experienced late fertility transition and high level of marital fertility until the 1950’s has been reported as an appropriate case to address this question. We select the village of Villagrande located at 700 meters above sea level in the province of Ogliastra with 3,441 inhabitants still involved in agro-pastoral activities and living and traditional life style still prevalent. Based on church and civil records we reconstruct 702 completed families with parents married between 1851 and 1955. Even if we observe that mothers losing one child have a lower over risk to have a new child during the transitional period compared to the period of natural fertility regime, the decrease of fertility is lower that what could be expected from the decrease in infant mortality. In fact the fertility level for mother without lost child increased in the first phase of the transition between 1931 and 1950 and started to decrease thereafter only.

The 21st century´s first decade witnessed the development of several ageing studies in Latin America. We use three nationally-representative studies of Latin American elderly: CRELES (Costa Rica), MHAS (Mexico) and PREHCO (Puerto Rico) to explore whether it was possible to describe baby boom patterns in these populations, as the ones observed for North America, Europe, and Australia during the post-World War II period. The clearest peak in mean children ever had is detected in Costa Rica: the mean complete fertility increased from around 6 children per woman during the 1930s to almost 8 children per woman near 1950; the increase is greater among more educated women. In Mexico, the mean children ever had for the whole country seems to have been steady during the 1930-1970 period; when disaggregated by education, it is clear that there was a “baby boom curve” for the more educated, while the less educated have nearly constant complete fertility during the same period. In Puerto Rico, fertility was lower than in the other countries. There was a slight increase in complete fertility around 1942 in the whole population; mean children ever born were around 0.5 children lower in the 1950s than in the 1940s. When controlling by education, fertility slightly increased for more educated women at the end of the 1940s.

A rapid process of aging currently visible everywhere in the developed world promises to be one of the major social and economic issues affecting societies for much of the twenty-first century, in particular in the coming decades. This process is not uniform, a fact that conditions its socioeconomic impact and leads to different types of policy. It can be shown that the specific shape of the aging process is the result of the way each country underwent its own particular cycle of fertility boom and fertility bust in its more or less recent past. In this paper time series data from a set of 24 countries in the developed world will be used in order to assess the way they underwent the boom and bust cycle and how this cycle affects the process of aging currently and in the future. Measures of the intensity and duration of both boom and bust will be proposed and results discussed. It will be shown that the intensity of the baby bust tends to be closely linked to the intensity of the baby boom, and both are linked to pre-war fertility levels. Policy implications of different patterns of aging will be discussed.

During the central decades of twentieth century the historical process of demographic transition was interrupted by a period of unexpected growing fertility that was called the baby boom. Up to the present the baby boom has been studied mainly in advanced societies. The main purpose of this paper is to explore the possibility of extending the analysis of baby boom to developing countries in order to find out whether we can properly speak of a baby boom among these non-developed populations. The paper provides a detailed description of baby boom from a comparative perspective (thirteen countries from four continents are included in the analysis) and it is based on a cohort approach to fertility. To this effect data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, International (IPUMS) are used. Data analysis shows that, with some exceptions, the baby boom was a global demographic phenomenon, although with important variations in terms of intensity, timing, and duration. Preliminary conclusions point to the fact that, in general, the baby boom was stronger in developing than in developed countries (with the very significant exception of USA).

This paper analyzes changes in the educational gradient of fertility among Swedish women that participated in the mid twentieth century baby boom in Sweden. By using individual level data, that covers the entire Swedish population drawn from the Population and Housing Census in 1970, and the Multiple Generation Register (MGR), the study determines fertility outcomes during the baby boom across educational strata. The results indicate important differences between the first wave of the baby boom during the 1940s and the second peak in the 1960s. This is the case both with regards to education, as well as age-specific fertility patterns. The results show that that a pertinent feature of the first wave was a fertility recovery among older cohorts that had postponed births during the 1930s and that the educational gradient was still strongly negative at this time. The second wave during the 1960s was on the other hand primarily created by increased fertility among younger women below 30 years of age. For these women born in the 1930s and 1940s, that increased their educational levels compared to earlier generations, fertility differentials across educational strata reached the lowest levels recorded so far during the twentieth century.

The goal of this paper is to address the micro determinants of reproductive behavior during the baby boom in Spain. The data used come from vital registration statistics and micro-census data, as well as from the recent Baby Boom and Bust Survey of Spain. This survey, undertaken between January and April of 2012, consists of 1,021 face to face interviews with women above 60 years of age randomly selected and representative for the entire country. In this paper, we apply an analytical strategy based on a bivariate and multivariate analysis (two models). The dependent variable for model 1 is children ever born and for model 2 it is the likelihood of having a third child among women having at least two childbirths. Within the two models we have used the following explanatory variables: year of birth, marital status, education, labor experience, age at first child, age at last child, fertility limitation, number of miscarriages, number of reproductive health problems, number of siblings of informant, and region of residence. We also include a variable related to partner social status.

Consequences of the Baby Boom in Iran

Author: Fatemeh Rabiee
Organization :Statistical Center of Iran
email:sima.rabiee@yahoo.com

Short Abstract
At the present, about 20.8 percent of Iran's 75.5 million population are aged between 25 and 34 which is the result of baby boom and high growth rate of 70th and 80th decades. Between1976 and 1986, the population of Iran grew at an average annual rate of 3.9 percent, it never experienced in population increase. The total fertility rate raised to nearly 7 and began declining sharply to below 3.0 in 1996, and to about 1.9 in the last census of 2011. This increase in the population growth rate, effect on economic and social factors.This large changes in the population growth rate also effect on labor productivity and living standards of people. When this group of babies becomes older, they will retire and will not be able to participate in economic activities.
Now,the baby boomers enter to market and rapidly growing number of new persons to the labor market has created a situation in which too many young people have a hard time.
This paper attempts to study the nature and process of age structural transition which is the result of baby boom by using the census data , Labor Force Survey and projection of population .
KEYWORDS: baby boom, total fertility rate