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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]

Contrary to conventional wisdom, recent studies argue that parenthood is not necessarily related to higher parental subjective well-being (SWB). However, parenthood remains an important aspect of adults' lives, also in highly developed societies where childbearing has become optional, financially expensive and affecting other goals in life. Whereas a great deal of effort has been put into answering why fertility is low in so many developed countries, one may even ask why is it not even lower. The answer is not obvious but stems from the fact that, to date, the relationship between fertility and SWB has been understudied and the mechanisms at work are not well understood. This special issue makes a step forward in this line of research, providing a coherent set of papers addressing different dimensions of the relationship between fertility and SWB and its mechanisms, starting from a demographic perspective, but integrating theories and research results from other disciplines. The collection of papers assesses the effect of the birth of a child on the individual SWB from angles still unexplored with the idea that the effects of fertility on individuals' SWB are diverse depending on individual, couple and country contextual factors. [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 article discusses how European women are historically bearing their first children later than ever before. In the United States and other countries, entry into parenthood is also seeing delays. Many experts argue that such fertility trends in developed countries are characterized by increasing, persistent, and arguably irreversible delays in childbearing in many socioeconomic conditions. Many of the informal age deadlines for childbearing are apparently being challenged and biological limits are being pushed. The article also presents information about the physiological aspects of late fertility and discusses the effect of new technologies on conception and pregnancy. Sweden's late and very late fertility is also examined.

The article presents the authors' views in response to a comment on their paper "Patterns of Low and Lowest-Low Fertility in Europe," published in a 2004 issue of the journal "Population Studies." In their comment, the critics have argued that the cohort-fertility analysis in the aforesaid paper is weak on theoretical grounds and the empirical analysis is incomplete. The authors affirm that they agree with the comment that, as a society, the Netherlands differs from Southern Europe and even more from Central and Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, from a contemporary global perspective, these differences should not be overemphasized. They say that in their analyses, they used the Netherlands as a reference case of a country with an extraordinary pattern of late childbearing that is not associated with lowest-low fertility levels. However, the critics believe that these unusual characteristics invalidate the use of the Dutch example in the paper. So, this criticism is misconceived. It is precisely the unusualness of the fertility pattern in the Netherlands that makes it a useful reference point in the study of low and lowest-low fertility.

Despite increasing research on the causes, consequences, and measurement of low fertility, questions about the nature and the extent of popular concerns over low fertility have yielded more speculation than examination. We address this gap in the literature through an analysis of 328 German newspaper and news magazine articles mentioning low fertility from 1993 to 2001. Our analysis reveals a paradox: while fertility rates have remained well below replacement levels and governmental discussions of low fertility have increased, discussion of low fertility as a concern in and of itself has been small and unchanging over time. We find this to be true because the problem of low fertility is rarely invoked as a concern in its own right, but is most often used as a tool in the popular debate to discuss other problems - political, economic, and cultural. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated the timing of fertility and marriage in Sweden using exogenous variation in the age at school graduation that results from differences in birth month. Our analysis found that the difference of 11 months in the age at leaving school between women who were born in two consecutive months, December and January, implies a delay in the age at first birth of 4.9 months. This effect of delayed graduation also persists for the timing of second births and first marriages, but it does not affect completed fertility or the overall probability of marriage before age 45. These results suggest the existence of a relatively rigid sequencing of demographic events in early adulthood, and the age at graduation from school emerges as an important factor in determining the timing--but not the quantum--of familyformation. In addition, these effects point to a potentially important influence of social age, defined by an individual's school cohort, instead of biological age. The relevance of social age is likely due to social interactions and peer-group influences exerted by individuals who are in the same school cohort but are not necessarily of the same age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Soziologie is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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.

This article investigates the fertility of Danish twins born during the periods 1870-1910 and 1953-64 in order to pursue two central questions for understanding human reproduction: Do genetic dispositions influence fertility and fertility-related behavior? Does the relevance of the "nature versus nurture" debate shift over time or with demographic regimes? The authors find that genetic influences on fertility exist, but that their relative magnitude and pattern are contingent on gender and on the socioeconomic environment experienced by cohorts. Among females born in 1880-90 and after 1955, about 30-50 percent of the variance in fertility is due to genetic influences; these influences are substantially smaller for earlier and for interim birth cohorts. Male fertility is generally subject to smaller genetic and larger shared-environment effects than female fertility. Because genetic effects are most prevalent in situations with deliberately controlled fertility and relatively egalitarian socioeconomic opportunities, the authors propose that the genetic dispositions affect primarily fertility behavior and motivations for having children. Analyses of fertility motivations, measured by age of first attempt to have a child, support this interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information about a study which focuses on the persistent diversity in contraceptive practices across communities, or social strata while focusing on a proposed model of learning in social networks for modern fertility control. Understanding contraceptive choice is essential for improving women's reproductive health and for providing effective family planning services. Markets for contraceptive information are frequently absent and media may fail to convey the complex set of ideas and procedures involved in the adoption of fertility control. Faced with this market failure, women make contraceptive decisions based on information from early adopters in their social networks. Results of the study suggests that regional diversity and social stratification in contraceptive practices arise due to informal communications, rather than in-depth discussions about fertility control. The information shared among network partners is limited and there is unobserved heterogeneity with respect to women's attributes and characteristics. The qualitative choice model used in this study, yields the prediction that the probability of a woman adopting modem contraception equals the proportion of number of users in her social network.

During the twentieth century, the global population has gone through unprecedented increases in economic and social development that coincided with substantial declines in human fertility and population growth rates. The negative association of fertility with economic and social development has therefore become one of the most solidly established and generally accepted empirical regularities in the social sciences. As a result of this close connection between development and fertility decline, more than half of the global population now lives in regions with below-replacement fertility (less than 2.1 children per woman). In many highly developed countries, the trend towards low fertility has also been deemed irreversible. Rapid population ageing, and in some cases the prospect of significant population decline, have therefore become a central socioeconomic concern and policy challenge. Here we show, using new cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of the total fertility rate and the human development index (HDI), a fundamental change in the well-established negative relationship between fertility and development as the global population entered the twenty-first century. Although development continues to promote fertility decline at low and medium HDI levels, our analyses show that at advanced HDI levels, further development can reverse the declining trend in fertility. The previously negative development–fertility relationship has become J-shaped, with the HDI being positively associated with fertility among highly developed countries. This reversal of fertility decline as a result of continued economic and social development has the potential to slow the rates of population ageing, thereby ameliorating the social and economic problems that have been associated with the emergence and persistence of very low fertility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]