Fertility Decline in the Developed World: Where Will It End?

Abstract

This paper presents a brief overview of fertility trends in post-transitional societies. Average fertility in the developed world reached a post-World War II maximum at 2.8 births per woman (bpw) during the peak of the baby boom in the late 1950s. Steep declines in the 1960s and 1970s left fertility below replacement reaching just 1.7 bpw during 1990-95. Below replacement fertility is now the norm in the developed world as well as in a small but growing number of populations elsewhere particularly Asian countries. This paper uses the total fertility rate (TFR) which is the most widely used indicator of period fertility to measure levels and trends in the fertility of populations. However ongoing changes in the timing of childbearing affect the fertility level measured in a given year or period. Examining parents childbearing intentions would be useful since TFR and other period measures of fertility may give misleading information. The findings state the reasons why current low fertility is unlikely to decline much further and may even rise in the future in a number of countries. The first reason is that the TFR is a hypothetical measure that can and often does give an inaccurate indication of the actual rate of childbearing of women. This rate is not as slow as implied by the TFR in many developed countries. A second reason for expecting fertility not to decline further is that couples in most post-transitional societies plan to have about two children.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 57 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.