Any prospects of fertility recovery in low-fertility societies?

Anthropological explanations of demographic outcomes have emphasized the need to understand how community structures contribute to those outcomes. Studies on fertility dynamics in Africa have focused on micro-level factors at the expense of the community context.
Using the most recent Demographic and Health survey data from Nigeria [West Africa], Kenya [East Africa], Egypt [North Africa], Cameroun [Central Africa] and Zimbabwe [Southern Africa]and multilevel modelling technique, our study demonstrate that there is significant community effects on African fertility patterns, even after controlling for a number of individual factors such as age, education, religion and ethnicity.The paper discusses the theoretical and practical implications of these findings to understanding emerging sub-saharan African fertility patterns.

Although the modeling of age specific fertility schedules has been exposed in a lot of researches, modeling fertility by birth order has received little attention. Several works have attempted to fit observed parity specific schedules, but none of them expands to models that could be used to estimate parity specific schedules when only data on all births combined fertility are available.

We propose to derive parity specific fertility rates from an overall age-specific (all births combined). Based on model proposed by Peristera and Kostaki for fitting fertility curves, we explore the assumption that there is a relationship between all the parameters of their model for all births combined and for parity specific, and derive several sets of coefficients to estimate age and parity specific fertility schedules from age and all birth combined fertility schedules.

This article assesses the micro and macro social factors that explain changes in the transition to the first birth and the entry into labour market in a Latin-American country with a peculiar demographic evolution: Uruguay. First, we examine the timing of the first birth and the timing of entry into the first full-time job of several female cohorts. We take into account the endogeneity of the decision-making process in the reproductive and productive spheres by estimating the mutual effects of reproductive and labour-market transitions on one another. Secondly, we study the interactions between the socio-economic context and the individual biographical characteristics, in a context of increasing female activity rates and higher levels of societal risks in the region. We evaluate the responses in the productive and reproductive behaviour to the changes in market and economic conditions. We focus on the characteristics that are more critical in determining the levels of social risk, most importantly unemployment rates and economic growth, seeking to establish the presence of pro-cyclical or anti-cyclical effects in individual reproductive trajectories—mediated by the labour market trajectories as well as the cohort, social origins and educational attainment levels. We use longitudinal survey data (2001 and 2008).

Based on the findings of previous empirical research, we can assume that differences between sectors and jobs in terms of security and flexibility of female employment might be important for fertility decisions. This relationship may arise because job characteristics influence the childbearing decision-making process directly or because women sort themselves into jobs based on their childbearing preferences. We aim to assess whether a relationship between job characteristics and fertility exists in Russia, a low fertility context, which can result from both directions of causality. We study the transition from childlessness to the first birth as well the transition to a second birth; the decline in second childbirths can account for a major part of the fertility decline in Russia, but postponement of childbearing can reduce the probability of subsequent births later as well. Our main research questions are the following: (1) To what extent do the intentions to and behavior of having a 1st and 2nd child correlate with women’s job characteristics? (2) Which job characteristics are more related to fertility intentions –flexibility, less working hours or job security after childbirth? Preliminary findings reveal that job characteristics and sectors are more related to the timing of the first birth than to having a second birth.

The influence of the gender system on the fertility transition has been demonstrated by many studies especially during the last three decades. Since the International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo in 1994 which stipulated that gender equality is a prerequisite for the achievement of fertility decline, gender issues became the subject of a public discussion particularly in developing countries where equity between the sexes is almost non-existent. This study aims to analyze the relationship between gender inequality and fertility transition in one of the Middle Eastern Arab countries: Syria. Our analysis of gender inequality and fertility is conducted at the aggregate level. We argue that variations in gender inequality across regions need to be considered in an analysis of regional variations in fertility in Syria. We used data from the published results of the census of 2004. The data include cross-sectional measures of socioeconomic and demographic characteristics at the district level for all of Syria. Our analysis was conducted on the population of 270 districts. Our results show that gender inequality exerts a major influence on regional variations in fertility.

The analysis of the fertility transition in Syria allows us to distinguish several phases. The first phase was when fertility reached world records, and resisted any change. Followed by the phase of rapid decline in the mid 1980s, and lastly by a phase of slow decrease or a phase of quasi-stagnation in fertility. Despite the interest to represent more accurate estimates of recent Syrian fertility levels and trends, very few studies have been devoted to this question. This paper addresses this issue by trying to review and analyze trends in fertility over the last three decades. Fertility rates are estimated by the own-children method using data from the SMCHS 1993 and the SFHS 2001 surveys as well as the multiple indicator cluster survey MICS3 conducted in 2006. The own-children estimates show that fertility has declined from almost 7.5 in the first half of the 1980s to about 6.3 in the second half, before declining to about 5.31 in the early 1990s and to about 3.12 in the mid-2000s. Despite this significant decline, the Syrian fertility transition is in a phase of stall or temporary blockage above 3 children per woman. Our arguments suggest continued stall of fertility decline at least in the visible future.

Currently the sustained worldwide decline in fertility has attracted more attention to some aspects of women’s reproductive stories and their social characteristics. This work is based on data from a survey of 1,200 women born between 1942-1953, living in Plaza de la Revolución, an urban area located in the north-central of Havana Province, capital of Cuba. The objective of this paper is analyze in-depth reproductive histories of the women who had children after the age of 30 and women who had no children, highlighting elements that may shed light on the possible choices and constraints that shaped the career of reproductive women interviewed. What makes them different of the rest of the sample that was characterized by an early age of childbearing?

We analyse the rarely studied transition to the first birth among Uruguayan male youngsters in 1990 and 2008, applying survival analysis in an exploratory approach to survey data. Our findings suggest a later timing in the first birth for male youngsters compared to female youngsters, accompanied by an educational attainment level gradient that is present for both sexes. Also, the differentials by education show an augmentation between 1990 and 2008, leading us to establish the hypothesis of a process of polarization in the transition to the first birth between the two time periods. We examine the extent of simultaneity with other markers of the transition to adulthood, such as leaving the parental home, entering the workforce and leaving the educational system, in order to establish the role of the first birth in the larger process of the transition to adulthood among males. We further analyse the impact of attributes such as region of residence and social origins.

This paper evaluates fertility changes, controlling for education, in five Latin American countries that have completed or are in the later stages of demographic transition. This study aims to assess the chances that some countries in the region will reach low or lowest-low fertility levels in the near future. The authors performed two decomposition exercises. First, a retrospective decomposition exercise evaluated the impact of changes in women’s educational composition and in the age-specific fertility rates (ASFR) on the observed decline in total fertility rates (TFR) between 2000 and 2010. Next, a prospective decomposition projects future educational composition and evaluated the expected decline in TFR if the series of ASFR are kept constant at the 2010 level. These exercises were applied to Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, and Colombia using IPUMS microdata (Minnesota Population Center 2012).

Paper addresses question whether decrease in female fecundity (reproductive senescence) during life cycle might have an influence on realization of fertility. Increasing age at first attempt to conceive might translate into lower than planned number of offspring due to divergence between lifecycle of modern females and changes in fecundity over the life course. We use waiting time to pregnancy (WtP) to account for impact of reproductive ageing on conception probability. This retrospective methodology reflects definition of sub-fertility and infecundity as number of months with regular unprotected intercourse ending (or not) in pregnancy. WtP has been implemented in Polish GGS and contains questions about infertility and number of menstrual cycles needed for conception. Analyses reveal significant increase in WtP among women aged 35+, slight increase among females aged 30-35 and no decrease for younger females. Estimates of infertility yields around 6% for females and around 3% for males (as declared by respondents). Taking into account age patterns of fertility in Poland, reproductive senescence might not have a great impact on realization of fertility intentions. However, due to increase in age at first reproduction we expect that share of couples having problems with conception (prolonged WtP) might increase in the future.