Vienna Yearbook of Population Research 2020, Vol. 18

This study reviews the institutional factors that have influenced the fertility and family trends in five East Asian societies that experienced a precipitous transition to very low fertility: China, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan. The paper begins by outlining the unique family formation patterns of these societies and the existing explanations for their observed ultra-low fertility levels. In particular, it highlights the role of Confucian culture, which emphasises patriarchal values and credentialism, in shaping the current state of low fertility in East Asia. For example, the ways in which Confucianism affects women’s roles at home, the effectiveness of pronatalist policies and the burden of human capital investments among parents are discussed. With these contextual factors and the current very low fertility rates as a backdrop, this study also examines attitudinal changes in marriage and family values that have taken place in these societies after the new millennium. These changes could further erode the traditional family and influence family formation trends in the future. The article concludes by discussing recent policy responses and the possible future of fertility in East Asia.

Keywords: fertility transition, ultra-low fertility, East Asia, Confucianism, patriarchy, credentialism, value changes, pronatalist policies

Between the early 1950s and the present, the global fertility transition has been nearly universal in the developing world. However, as of 2017, two countries out of the 190 countries for which the United Nations provides fertility estimates had not yet met the conventional criterion for establishing the onset of the fertility transition (a decline of at least 10 per cent from peak fertility), and another five countries did so only very recently. These are the laggards in the global fertility transition. The countries are all in sub-Saharan Africa: Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, The Gambia, Mali, Niger, and Somalia. This paper first reviews the fertility history of these seven countries, and subsequently provides data on the timing and pace of the global fertility transition in the four major developing regions: Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, Northern Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa. It then explores potential reasons for the slow emergence of fertility decline in each country. The paper concludes with a discussion of each country’s prospects for fertility decline, which generally are weaker than those in the projections of the United Nations.

Keywords: global fertility transition, laggards, sub-Saharan Africa, pace of fertility decline, factors influencing fertility

Building on the well-established knowledge on fertility differentials by education and nativity/migration status, we employ microsimulation modelling to demonstrate the effect of accounting for such differences in population projections. We consider fertility differentials by educational attainment, enrolment in full-time education, region of birth, age at immigration, and duration of stay in the host country, which we introduce step-wise into the microsimulation model for the EU28. Results on projected TFRs and births by 2060 illustrate the importance of accounting for several sources of population heterogeneity. In the context of future educational expansion, modelling education differentials for students and for women with completed education is needed to capture the postponement effect of education on childbearing. Future migration assumptions that include migrant fertility differentials lead to widely varying projected numbers of future births. At fixed fertility differentials and a fixed composition of immigrant flows, the net effect of immigrant fertility on the overall TFR in the EU28 is projected to increase from the estimated 0.12 in 2015–2019 to 0.17 in 2055–59 in the scenario with baseline migration, and to 0.25 in 2055–59 in the scenario with doubled migration.

Keywords: population projection, microsimulation, Fertility, education, Immigrants

In high-income countries, women and men born since the 1940s have delayed the birth of their first child, more of them have remained childless, and the timing of the first birth has become more diverse in these cohorts. The interaction between these three trends makes the research on first birth patterns more complex. This study has two main aims: (1) we introduce an alternative index, Expected Years Without Children (EYWC), to quantify changes in first birth behaviour; and (2) we decompose the changes in EYWC over time into three effects: remaining permanently childless, postponing the first birth, and the expansion of the standard deviation of the mean age at first birth. Using data from the Human Fertility Database, EYWC is calculated to illustrate time trends among women born in the 1910s–1960s in eight countries with longer series of data on cohort first birth trends: Canada, the Czech Republic, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, and the United States. Our decomposition shows that the changes in EYWC are mainly attributable to postponement in North America and northern Europe, whereas these changes are largely due to increasing shares of women remaining childless in Japan and Portugal.

Keywords: childlessness, postponement of first birth, decomposition method, Coale-McNeil model, life table

We analyse the socio-economic and cultural factors that influence the timing of the first birth in Kyrgyzstan. As in several other developing countries in Central Asia, no trend towards the postponement of fertility has been observed in Kyrgyzstan. This contrasts not only with the current trend towards later parenthood that has been documented in highly developed countries, but with an incipient trend towards a delay in the timing of the first birth that has been reported in many developing countries. Our study is based on the Multiple Indicators Cluster Survey – 2014 (MICS2014), with complementary data drawn from the Demography and Health Survey – 2012 (DHS2012). Our analysis of the first union and of the first birth in a union for cohorts of women born between 1965 and 1998 showed that the rates of union formation and motherhood have increased among the younger cohorts.We also found that a woman’s education, labour market experience, and the gender relations in her family influenced her likelihood of transitioning to a first union and to motherhood. In addition, we uncovered significant differences in the timing of motherhood and union formation between women of different ethnicities, and looked at the factors that may have contributed to these differences. The factors that support a stable age pattern of fertility in Kyrgyzstan are of interest when conducting broader comparative research on fertility timing in developing countries, as these factors may help explain the current diversity in these patterns.

Keywords: fertility timing, fertility postponement, age at first birth, developing countries, Central Asia

Several authors have studied the late fertility transition in Sardinia, which did not start until the 1950s. This contribution aims to investigate the association between the decline in marital fertility and the fall in infant and child mortality. We use individual data to undertake classical family reconstruction starting from the mid- 19th century for the population of two Sardinian villages, Villagrande Strisailli and Seulo, which we have previously studied for their remarkable longevity. Our results indicate that in this population, there were very few signs of fertility decline prior to 1920, and fertility decreased only gradually before 1950, but that the decline in fertility accelerated thereafter. We also found that infant and child mortality decreased slightly between the two world wars, and did not decline substantially until after the Second World War. The question arises as to whether these two transitions were associated, and, if they were, which one preceded the other. Our results suggest that there was some degree of synchronisation, with more pronounced changes beginning in the 1950s. We found that this association cannot simply be explained by a causal relationship based on altered demographic behaviour. Substantial socio-economic changes that began between the two world wars and developed fully in the 1950s might have caused both fertility and mortality declines within a traditional society that was undergoing a transition to adapt to the modern world.

Keywords: marital fertility, infant mortality, child mortality, demographic transition, family reconstruction, Sardinia, longevity blue zone

Using digital traces to investigate demographic behaviours, I leverage in this paper aggregated web search data to develop a Future Orientation Index for 200 countries and territories across the world. This index is expressed as the ratio of Google search volumes for ‘next year’ (e.g., 2021) to search volumes for ‘current year’ (e.g., 2020), adjusted for country-level internet penetration rates. I show that countries with lower levels of future orientation also have higher levels of fertility. Fertility rates decrease quickly as future orientation levels increase; but at the highest levels of future orientation, this correlation flattens out. Theoretically, I reconstruct the role that varying degrees of future orientation might play in fertility decisions by incorporating advances in behavioural economics into a traditional quantity-quality framework à la Becker.

Keywords: future orientation, total fertility rate, hyperbolic discounting, quantityquality trade-off, digital trace dat, Google trends, digital demography