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An increasing number of developing countries are experiencing below replacement fertility rates. Although the factors associated with low fertility in developed countries have been widely explored in the literature, studies of low fertility in middle- and low-income countries continue to be rare. To help fill this gap, Brazil was used as a case study to assess whether human development, gender equality and the ability of mothers with young children to work are associated with the likelihood of married or cohabiting women to have a child. For this purpose, multilevel logistic regressions were estimated using the 1991, 2000 and 2010 Brazilian Demographic Censuses. It was found that human development was negatively associated with fertility in the three periods analysed. Gender equality and the ability of mothers with young children to work were positively associated with the odds of having higher order births in Brazil in 2000 and 2010. In 1991, these variables were not associated with higher order births, and gender equality was negatively associated with first births. The positive association found in 2000 and 2010 may constitute a reversal of the relationship that in all likelihood prevailed earlier in the demographic transition when gender equality was most likely negatively correlated with fertility levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Very few studies have investigated mental health in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Using data from Malawi, this article provides a first picture of the demography of depression and anxiety (DA) among mature adults (aged 45 or older) in a low-income country with high HIV prevalence. DA are more frequent among women than men, and individuals affected by one are often affected by the other. DA are associated with adverse outcomes, such as poorer nutrition intake and reduced work efforts. DA also increase substantially with age, and mature adults can expect to spend a substantial fraction of their remaining lifetime-for instance, 52 % for a 55-year-old woman-affected by DA. The positive age gradients of DA are not due to cohort effects, and they are in sharp contrast to the age pattern of mental health that has been shown in high-income contexts, where older individuals often experience lower levels of DA. Although socioeconomic and risk- or uncertainty-related stressors are strongly associated with DA, they do not explain the positive age gradients and gender gap in DA. Stressors related to physical health, however, do. Hence, our analyses suggest that the general decline of physical health with age is the key driver of the rise of DA with age in this low-income SSA context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fertility throughout East Asia has fallen rapidly over the last five decades and is now below the replacement rate of 2.1 in every country in the region. Using South Korea as a case study, we argue that East Asia's ultra-low fertility rates can be partially explained by the steadfast parental drive to have competitive and successful children. Parents throughout the region invest large amounts of time and money to ensure that their children are able to enter prestigious universities and obtain top jobs. Accordingly, childrearing has become so expensive that the average couple cannot afford to have more than just one or two children. The trend of high parental investment in child education, also known as ‘education fever’, exemplifies the notion of ‘quality over quantity’ and is an important contributing factor to understanding low-fertility in East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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This paper reviews several studies that investigated the potential role of genetic factors in determining fertility outcomes. Our review demonstrates convincingly that fertility contains genetic variance; that is, differences between humans in their genetic make-up affects their fertility outcomes and fertility-related behaviours. This finding is robust using both heritabilities and coefficients of genetic variation, and using both direct measures of fertility outcomes and also fertility precursors like fecundity, marriage, fertility expectations and attempts to get pregnant (proception). Moreover, genetic variance can change over short periods of time or across educational levels, specifically for females, and the relevance of genetic variance seems to increase during times of increasing reproductive choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a comment on an article which discussed a model of European age-specific fertility patterns using Hadwiger functions. The authors fit the functions to an array of European populations and, in order to interpret the parameters, show the high correlation between a and total fertility, c and mean age of the mother, and ab/c and the modal age specific fertility rate. The authors reflect the analytical relationship between the parameters of the Hadwiger function and the properties of such a function which are developed. As the authors conjectured, c is needed in the analytical mean age of the Hadwiger function, and the analytical total fertility is proportional to a. The analytical total fertility of Hadwiger functions can be obtained by integration over an interval, which requires the c parameter to be positive. In exploring the relationship between the modal age at childbearing and the Hadwiger parameters, the modal age was obtained by differentiating f(x) with respect to x and equaling to zero. The a parameter is just an intensity parameter which should not affect the modal age. The c parameter reflects mean age at childbearing, and that there should be a direct relationship between mean and modal ages.