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This paper reviews cohort fertility trends and patterns in seven successor countries of former Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia’s socialist self-management in many ways differed from other state socialist regimes in Europe. Yugoslavia itself was very rich in diversity ; it comprised countries with strikingly different customs, traditions, and family practices. However, Yugo-specific cohort fertility dynamics has not yet been fully explored in the literature. Our study aims to fill this gap. More specifically, we address the following research questions: What are the trends and patterns of cohort fertility in ex-Yugoslav countries? Are some countries more similar to one another than to other countries? Can country clusters be identified? And, if so, what might account for this homogeneity within (ex-)Yugoslavia’s heterogeneity? Do ex-Yugoslav countries exhibit persistent (between-cluster) diversity, or is there (at least some) convergence in terms of cohort fertility behaviour? We use census data from the last three census rounds (1990, 2000, 2010) to develop a wide array of cohort fertility indicators, including cohort fertility rates (CFRs), CFRs by birth order, parity progression ratios (PPRs), and parity distributions. We focus on women born between 1930 and 1970. Their reproductive careers range from the 1950s baby boom up to the post-socialist transition era. The analyses we present are primarily descriptive, and we rely on various data visualisation tools to better discern between-country (dis)similarities. Our preliminary findings reveal that the ex-Yugoslav countries can be clustered into three clusters: Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia had relatively low level of cohort fertility (around 2) already by cohort 1930 and pertained this levels through the analysed cohort span. This cluster is very homogeneous also in terms of parity progression ratios and the parity composition, with strong focus on two-child family. Second cluster consists of Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Here the fertility level steadily declined from around 4–5 among cohorts born in 1910s towards two children per woman by cohorts born in 1970. Third cluster is constituted of the sole country of Kosovo, with comparatively still very high levels of cohort fertility in European context. The paper further analyses the mechanism of changes in cohort fertility in terms of in parity progression ratios and the consequences on the parity composition of families.

This study provides a systematic analysis of parity components of the cohort fertility decline in 32 low-fertility countries in Europe, North America, Australia and East Asia. We decompose the change in cohort fertility in each country among women born between 1940 and 1970 using parity progression ratios (PPR) derived mostly from census, register data, and large-scale surveys. We are also interested in how the effect of the changing parity progression ratios varied across broader regions and whether it was different in countries reaching very low completed fertility. The fall in fertility was mostly driven by reductions in the progression ratios to third and higher-order births in the first stage of 1940 to 1955 cohorts. Among women born between 1955 and 1970 fertility decline slowed down in most regions. This second stage of the cohort fertility decline analysed here is also distinguished by its regional diversity. The main distinction can be drawn between Central and Eastern Europe, where fertility decline was driven primarily by falling second birth rates and the German-speaking countries, Southern Europe, and East Asia, where the fall in first birth rates (and the corresponding rise in childlessness) had a stronger influence.

Childlessness, a driving force of fertility, has undergone strong variations in 20th-century Europe, and educational attainment has been rising continuously. We analyse how these two factors were related to each other over time. Our study is based on census and largescale survey data from 13 European countries, collected in the Cohort Fertility and Education database. We compare the trends in the share of women childless at age 40+ in the 1916-1965 birth cohorts, by level of education. The results suggest that the changes in the educational composition of the population were only marginally related to the overall variation in childlessness rates. With time, the positive educational gradient in childlessness usually decreased: the differences between women of medium/high education and low educated women diminished. However, the childlessness ratio between highly and medium educated women remained stable in Western and Southern Europe and even slightly increased in the East.