Revisiting the fertility transition: long term perspectives

Most of demographic theoretical explanations could be divided along the lines of two major premises of social science: first, the modernization theory and, second, institutional approach. According to the first explanation, demographic transitions are staged, irreversible, universal across space and time, progressive, lengthy, Europeanized and homogenizing. Major variants of demographic transition theories (first and second) fit these very premises. In opposite to it, the institutional approach emphasizes the major impact of the local (parochial) specifics in defining the demographic developments including fertility dynamics.
Demographic developments in the world provide a rich evidence for testing these largely competing explanations. Demographic developments in the countries of Eastern Asia serve as a good testing ground. The uniqueness of these countries is that they combine rapid modernization with the lag in changing of the gender roles. That leads to the pattern of fertility – one of the lowest in the modern world. The paper elaborates on developments in the region, provides alternative explanations of the demographic developments in the region and concludes on the possible contribution of the developments’ analysis to the validity of both major theoretical explanations.

In this paper, we present a method for reconstructing and smoothing fertility trends by combining birth histories from multiple surveys. Data used in the paper come from World fertility surveys and Demographic and Health surveys . This method usesPoisson regression and restricted cubic splines to produce detailed long term fertility trends. In the first part, we present the method and illustrate its application by combining several fertility surveys in Colombia. Next, simulated birth histories are used to validate the method in a variety of situations. Finally, the method is applied to several countries, from various parts of the world, with varying numbers of surveys and with different data quality problems. Finally, these trends are compared with published fertility trends.

The last two centuries have been marked by extremely large increases in life expectancy and reductions in variability of age at death. In this paper, we analyze how the `mortality revolution' has altered individuals' lived experience of death during life. Drawing upon nearly 360 years of historical and projected age-specific demographic rates for Sweden, we use formal demographic analysis and microsimulation to measure the extent and timing of child loss across the demographic transition as well as the average age at first experience of death of a maternal kin member and the type of kin death experienced. Our results indicate a considerable reduction in child loss across cohorts and a concentration of child loss in old age, an increase in the average age individuals experience their first maternal kin death, and a shift in first death experience from that of a sister, mother, or aunt to that of a grandmother. The transformation of the lived experience of kin death that we document has had profound implications for the health and well-being of individuals, the timing of major life course events, and the inequality of access to kinship resources.

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.

In the recent literature on young age mortality, quite some attention has been devoted to the spread of deaths between families. Most infant deaths seem to cluster in a rather limited number of families, an observation which has been named ‘death clustering’. Studying infant mortality from a family perspective relocalizes the focus of explanations from individual characteristics to family traits. Family-level explanations might not only enhance our knowledge of causes of infant mortality, it will also improve our understanding of mortality differentials.
This paper aims at studying death clustering over time. The data stems from a historical, 19th century population where mortality levels are still at a constant high, but the early stages of the fertility transition have already been set off. The changing population structure in terms of family sizes affects how mortality is spread between families. Infant mortality will be studied from both a familial perspective, and a hierarchical (multilevel) structure where infant death risks are dependent from one another. By using the perspective of death clustering, the focus is shifted towards the family, enhancing an in-depth look to the relationship of infant mortality and the fertility decline.

The paper studies the fertility transition and explains under which conditions its forerunners started to reduce their fertility. It focuses on Jews in Bohemia, who had low fertility rates very early on, not only in comparison with the total country population but also in comparison to Jews elsewhere in Europe. A unique set of aggregate data on population change from the late 18th century until the Shoah allows tracking the process of Jewish fertility transition in its entirety, comparing it with gentiles and interpreting it in its cultural and socio-historical context. The paper shows that Jewish fertility was limited within marriage already in the 18th century. A further sharp decrease came after 1848, when Jews acquired equal civil rights. The necessary conditions for fertility decline thus came together at this time: low mortality, upward mobility aspirations, high human capital, low religiosity, and a favorable legal and socio-economic environment.

In this paper we aim to study the fertility prospects of Brazil major regions based on a cohort analysis, starting from the mid-1960s. Using micro-census data from 1980 to 2010 it is reconstructed the fertility history of women in five macro regions of the country, namely: North, Northeast, South, Southeast and Midwest. Based on the complete birth history, we reconstruct cohort fertility and afterwards, we apply two methods to analyze the past, present and future trends in Brazilian fertility. First, it is applied a basic benchmark cohort model in order to understand the past and present progress of fertility. For the future prospects, we apply a New Cohort Fertility Forecasts, developed by Myrskylä et al. (2012). As results, we see that there are clear regional differences in cohort fertility. Even in cohort perspective, the levels of Brazilian cohort fertility are still below replacement levels and very concentrated at the young ages of reproductive span. However, in the more developed South and Southeast parts of the country there are signs of fertility postponement. This will result in further decline of fertility in the near future.

There is a shortage of research into the institutions governing fertility in pre-transitional settings, particularly in Third World populations during the colonial era. The common view that everywhere fertility was high before demographic transition is largely without empirical support. This paper focuses on the pre-transition Kingdom of Siam which though independent was surrounded by colonies and imbedded in an era of global influences. This paper aims to understand the demographic system regulating population change in the pre-transitional (largely 19th century) Kingdom of Siam, and then extend the analysis in the twentieth century and precipitous fertility decline. The authors combine extensive archival research with modeling of the 19th century demography using an inverse projection algorithm (POPULATE) and demographic assumptions inferred from a close reading of the historical record. Two scenarios are presented, one constructed around the classic demographic transition assumptions, including high fertility, and the other around sharply different assumptions (including a moderate level of fertility) better incorporating the institutions and global/colonial influences prevailing at the time. Prominent in this narrative are corvee and warfare-based labor policies before about 1850, and then opening to commercial export agric

The proposed conference paper will produce a new set of general fertility estimations for the Québec population, drawing upon the Registre de la population du Québec ancien (RPQA). While the fertility behaviour of the pioneering generations is already known, the proposed paper will push our knowledge further forward in time, comparing fertility patterns under the two political regimes and across regions and parishes, and incorporating a host of new perspectives and methods. In particular, we will draw upon life course theory and biographical analytic methods to situate individual fertility patterns within the context of inter-generational and intra-generational patterns. Our study will focus on 25,115 women born in Québec during a later period, up to 1750, whose death date is known. This choice will allow us to compare the reproductive histories of women both before and after the change in political regime from French to English. A preliminary profile of these women indicates a population which was largely rural, whose first and last births occurred on average at ages 23.5 and 37.65. These women gave birth to an average 6.8 children, of whom an average of 5 survived to at least age 12.

Differential patterns of transitions between births in a population describe the dynamics of family building and signify varying impacts of social change on population growth. In the present paper, an attempt has been made to analyze the changing patterns of reproductive timing of females of Orissa (one of the 29 states of India) in the last over two decades (between 1981-82 and 2005-06). Life table estimates of female’s age at the time of childbirth of specific order in two different time periods (being more than two decades apart) are compared for some subgroups of the study population. The results show that there is a change in the reproductive timing of females with time and the socio-demographic variables works differently with respect to time.