Romania and the Second Demographic Transition: The Traditional Value System and Low Fertility Rates

Abstract

This article examines the "second demographic transition" theory in light of changes in the Romanian demographic structure over the past fifty years. The author shows that the birth-death rate imbalance, currently manifested in many countries including Romania, does not necessarily follow from changes in the value system surrounding the family and relationships among its members, nor is it necessarily associated with other behavioral changes such as higher levels of cohabitation, increased divorce rates, and more single mothers, as the theory posits. Findings indicate that for Romanian women, as for many of their counterparts in Western countries, the classic model of the "bourgeois family," which centers on the child, is still the dominant one. Nonetheless, despite rather "traditional" attitudes toward family and children, which have remained pretty stable over the years, since 1989 Romania has experienced a dramatic decline in total fertility rate (TFR), and currently has one of the lowest fertility levels in the world.

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 — 34 citations exist upstream.

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