In studies of the fertility of migrants in which the data are confined to the migrants only, estimation bias will normally appear in comparisons of childbearing before and after migration. The same ...issue arises in studies of union formation before and after first birth, marriage formation before and after home purchase, and in any other comparison of behaviour before and after an index event if one confines the study only to those who have experienced the index event. It is normally better to avoid analysis of behaviour before the index event because such analysis actually conditions on the later arrival of the index event. In this paper, we provide graphical and mathematical representations of this problem and show how one can get a meaningful (unconditional) comparison of behaviour before and after the index event provided the data contain enough information for both sub-periods. Otherwise, the analyst should refrain from making a comparison of this nature.
Overview Chapter 8 Hoem, Jan M.
Demographic research,
07/2008, Volume:
19, Issue:
10
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This chapter outlines the positions in the current debate about the possibility of using public policies to influence fertility. We note the polarization between, on the one hand, those who view ...public policies as obvious means for lifting the currently low fertility levels in Europe, in line with the role of economic policies in a modern society; and, on the other hand, those who feel that family policies are inefficient, and perhaps even unnecessary. We place the contributions of the national chapters of this book in this framework and describe the formidable methodological difficulties that face those who seek to investigate policy impacts on fertility behavior. While properly conducted empirical investigations have overcome such problems and have clearly demonstrated policy effects in specific circumstances, we conclude that, in general, national fertility is possibly best seen as a systemic outcome that depends more on broader attributes, such as the degree of family-friendliness of a society, and less on the presence and detailed construction of monetary benefits.
Modern Scandinavian population registers provide excellent data sources that allow a user to quickly gain an impression of the level of fertility and its structure across subpopulations. This may ...also allow the analyst to check a feature of the much-cited disruption hypothesis, at least in part. The purpose of this article is to exploit this potential to give an overview of the structure of recent total fertility after immigration to Sweden from various groups of sending countries, separately for males and females. The authors have found that the post-migration fertility compensation specified as part of the fertility disruption hypothesis is visibly confirmed in their Swedish study population for female European immigrants from non-EU countries and for female immigrants from non-European countries with a low or medium UN Human Development Index, but not so for other female immigrants, ie not for those who come from a Nordic country or from a non-Nordic EU country, and not for female immigrants from a non-European country with a high Human Development Index, including the US.
Using data from the first round of the national Gender and Generations Surveys of Russia, Romania, and Bulgaria, and from a similar survey of Hungary, which were all collected in recent years, we ...study rates of entry into marital and non-marital unions. We have used elements from the narrative of the Second Demographic Transition (SDT) as a vehicle to give our analysis of the data from the four countries some coherence, and find what can be traces of the SDT in these countries. The details vary by country; in particular, latter-day developments in union formation patterns did not start at the same time in all the countries, but in our assessment it began everywhere before communism fell, that is, before the societal transition to a market economy got underway in 1990. /// A partir des données de la première vague d'enquêtes du projet Générations et Genre en Russie, en Roumanie et en Bulgarie, et à partir d'une enquête comparable en Hongrie, toutes conduites récemment, cette étude s'intéresse aux taux d'entrée en union conjugale et non-conjugale. Nous avons utilisé des éléments du cadre descriptif de la seconde transition démographique comme grille d'analyse pour donner une cohérence aux données des quatre pays, et pour y explorer les traces de ce modèle de transition. Chaque pays a un contexte à part; en particulier, les évolutions récentes dans les modalités de formation des unions ont des calendriers variables, mais d'après notre étude le processus a commencé partout avant la chute du communisme, et done avant la transition à l'économie de marché dans les années 90.
In this paper we extend the concept of educational attainment to cover the field of education taken in addition to the conventional level of education attained. Our empirical investigation uses ...register records containing childbearing and educational histories of an entire cohort of women born in Sweden (about a quarter-million individuals). This allows us to operate with a high number of educational field-and-level combinations (some sixty in all). It turns out that the field of education serves as an indicator of a woman’s potential reproductive behavior better than the mere level attained. We discover that in each field permanent childlessness increases some with the educational level, but that the field itself is the more important. In general, we find that women educated for jobs in teaching and health care are in a class of their own, with much lower permanent childlessness at each educational level than in any other major grouping. Women educated in arts and humanities or for religious occupations have unusually high fractions permanently childless.
Our results cast doubt on the assumption that higher education per se must result in higher childlessness. In our opinion, several factors intrinsic and extrinsic to an educational system (such as its flexibility, its gender structure, and the manner in which education is hooked up to the labor market) may influence the relationship between education and childlessness, and we would not expect a simple, unidirectional relationship.
We explore trends in first-union formation in Bulgaria from 1960, using data from the national Gender and Generations Survey of 2004. We analyse jointly the transition into cohabitation and directly ...into marriage. The standardized marriage rate falls dramatically from the early 1980s; the corresponding rate of entry into cohabitation has already increased from the early 1960s but (surprisingly) falls moderately toward the end of our period. Cohabitation also tends to last progressively longer in more recent periods. The analysis shows that a pregnancy leads to a dramatic increase in the rate of both kinds of union formation: the increase is by a factor of almost 20 for marriage formation and about 10 for entry into cohabitation, ceteris paribus. Our findings suggest that, in Bulgaria at least, some manifestations of the Second Demographic Transition can be detected as early as the 1980s.
Jusqu’à la fin des années 1980, l’union libre était rare en Roumanie. Après la chute du régime socialiste, cette proportion a progressivement augmenté pour atteindre environ 10 % en 2005, évolution ...qui a eu des conséquences sur la fécondité. Cet article présente certaines caractéristiques de la fécondité des couples mariés et non mariés entre 1985 et 2005 à partir des données de l’enquête GGS réalisée en Roumanie en 2005, par le calcul des taux de fécondité par durée de l’union et l’utilisation d’un paramètre synthétique basé sur la somme de ces taux toutes durées d’union confondues, indépendamment de la parité. L’analyse met en évidence les catégories de femmes qui ont eu particulièrement tendance à avoir des enfants sans être mariées : les femmes à faible niveau d’instruction et celles d’origine rurale. Dans ces deux groupes, les femmes qui vivaient en union libre ont été fortement affectées par les changements considérables de la politique familiale dans les années 1990, après quoi leur fécondité totale hors mariage est devenue du même ordre de grandeur que celle des femmes mariées. Pour les femmes de ces deux catégories, le fait d’être mariée ou non ne semble guère avoir d’influence sur leur fécondité.
The Generations and Gender Survey (GGS) is one of the two pillars of the Generations and Gender Programme designed to improve understanding of demographic and social development and of the factors ...that influence these developments. This article describes how the theoretical perspectives applied in the survey, the survey design and the questionnaire are related to this objective.
The key features of the survey include panel design, multidisciplinarity, comparability, context-sensitivity, inter-generational and gender relationships. The survey applies the life course approach, focussing on the processes of childbearing, partnership dynamics, home leaving, and retiring. The selection of topics for data collection mainly follows the criterion of theoretically grounded relevance to explaining one or more of the mentioned processes. A large portion of the survey deals with economic aspects of life, such as economic activity, income, and economic well-being; a comparably large section is devoted to values and attitudes. Other domains covered by the survey include gender relationships, household composition and housing, residential mobility, social networks and private transfers, education, health, and public transfers. The third chapter of the article describes the motivations for their inclusion.
The GGS questionnaire is designed for a face-to-face interview. It includes the core that each participating country needs to implement in full, and four optional submodules on nationality and ethnicity, on previous partners, on intentions of breaking up, and on housing, respectively. The participating countries are encouraged to include also the optional sub-modules to facilitate comparative research on these topics.
Italy has long been regarded as the country with negligible non-marital cohabitation par excellence, but lately the pattern has begun to change and entry into consensual unions has increased strongly ...in younger Italian generations. This article is devoted to a study of such features between 1980 and 2003 based on the data from the Italian variant of the Gender and Generations Survey, Round 1. We consider entry into marriage and entry into cohabitation as competing risks and show how the incidence of cohabitation consistently much lower but has increased by some 70% over the 20-odd years of our study, while the marriage rate has dropped by almost as much. We find great variation across major regions of the country. The rise in cohabitation is confined to Northern and Central Italy, while the risk of marriage formation has declined strongly all over the country. Unlike previous investigations, our data suggest that non-marital cohabitation may be taking over whatever minor role civil marriage has had in Italian union formation. Adapted from the source document.
By current European standards, Sweden has had a relatively high fertility in recent decades. During the 1980s and 1990s, the annual Total Fertility Rate (TFR) for Sweden undulated considerably around ...a level just under 1.8, which is a bit lower than the corresponding level in France and well above the level in West Germany. (In 2004 the Swedish TFR reached 1.76 on an upward trend.) The Swedish completed Cohort Fertility Rate (CFR) was rather constant at 2 for the cohorts that produced children in the same period; for France it stayed around 2.1 while the West-German CFR was lower and declined regularly to around 1.6. In this presentation, I describe the background for these developments and explain the unique Swedish undulations.
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