Family Behaviour in East Asia and Southern Europe

Scientific Panel on Family Behavior in East Asia and Southern Europe: Trends, Socioeconomic Differences, and the Role of Social, Economic, Political, Cultural, and Historical Context.

This panel will bring together researchers from East Asia and Southern Europe, and from around the world, to develop and empirically evaluate a broad, comprehensive set of questions focused on demographic similarities (and differences) between and within these two distinctive low fertility regions. Limiting our focus to these select regions and countries will enable the panel to contribute in a compelling way to a range of broader demographic questions central to research on the second demographic transition, gender and fertility, and economic uncertainty and fertility. Focusing our attention on specific, well-defined, theoretically informed contextual similarities and differences in a small set of demographically similar countries and employing rigorous analytical approaches to high-quality population data, the panel will be able to generate a much more nuanced understanding of the factors contributing to persistent low fertility. It will also allow us to advance our understanding of how those factors interact with each other and how these relationships differ across and within the two regions.