In in Simcoe Muskoka, women in the year old age group and year old age group had the highest fertility rates in at The Total Fertility Rate TFR is the average number of children that would be born per woman if all women lived to the end of their childbearing years and bore children according to the age-specific fertility rates for that area and time period.
Without immigration, population size declines when the TFR is less than 2. Decreased fertility rates have been associated with increased urbanization, higher levels of education among women, higher participation rates in the labour force for women, prevention of unwanted pregnancies, greater access to abortion, unstable employment, and economic instability.
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Premium supplements. Real gross domestic income real GDI. Rest of the world account. Population aged Population aged 60 or over. Population aged 65 or over. Population aged 80 or over. About UNdata Advanced search Explorer. Documentation Browse Web Service. Current Filters:. Remove All. Apply Filters. A basic indicator of the level of fertility, calculated by summing age-specific birth rates over all reproductive ages.
It may be interpreted as the expected number of children a women who survives to the end of the reproductive age span will have during her lifetime if she experiences the given age-specific rates. Population Estimates and Projections. National Accounts Main Aggregates. A recent one is the study by Reher et al. And there is also empirical evidence for child hoarding: Raaj Say 21 and Sebnem Kalemli-Ozcan 22 both find evidence for the importance of hoarding and therefore for the reduction of child mortality rates as a driver of decreasing fertility rates.
Several macro studies look at the relationship and provide evidence: Luis Angeles 23 investigates the relationship in a large set of developed and developing countries from onwards and finds a large effect. Crucially the author finds a lag of about 10 years for the decline of child mortality to translate into declining fertility. In this visualization, we can see correlation that we expect. Countries with high child mortality rates tend to have much higher fertility rates, while countries with low child mortality rates experience lower fertility rates.
But as child health improves and fewer children die we see in country after country that the fertility rate falls and countries move into the bottom left corner of the chart. Consistent with the explanation of hoarding we see that women do not immediately reduce the number of birth and only after a lag of some years will the fertility rate adjust to the lower mortality rate.
An aspect emphasized already is that the high number of children in the past is not an accident. Families wanted many children because they needed many children. In the agricultural, poor economies of the past children were contributing to the household productively from a young age on.
Child labour was very common as we show in our entry on child labor. This changed when the economy modernized. Technological changes were closely tied to political changes and indeed economic and technological development, with the shift from a low tech to a high tech economy, amplified the changing moral perspective on child labour and contributed to a decreasing employment and thereby to a declining demand for children. The fact that restrictions in child labor had an effect on fertility rates is also strongly suggesting that indeed the importance of child labor before was an important incentive for the high number of children parents had before.
These government policies were important for the reduction of the number of children per woman and the fast economic growth in the region. The basic argument for why the increase of education contributed to the decline of fertility rates derives again from the seminal work of Becker who argued that because of the costs of bringing up a child parents have to make a decision between the number of children they want quantity and the resources they want to spend on each child quality.
The argument in a nutshell is that educating children is very costly and since parents have limited resources the increasing costs of having children forced them to have fewer children. The model developed by Soares , 28 argues that declining child mortality changes parents incentive in the quantity-quality-tradeoff described above. In the high mortality environment of the past, investments in the education of children had low returns since there was a high risk that the child does not survive.
Parents therefore did not want to spend resources in educating children who are at a high risk of premature death and therefore might not benefit from that education. With little incentive into the uncertain future of their children, parents instead hoped to maximize the contribution from children to the household by increasing the quantity of children.
Lower child mortality increases the incentives to invest more resources into each child and with limited resources parents therefore chose to have fewer children. Falling mortality of children is of course not the only reason why children in societies with better living conditions are better educated.
Technological change killed many of the low-skill, routine tasks that kept our ancestors busy and meant that workers in a modern economy need a much higher level of education.
The economic change driven by technological improvements meant that the returns to education increased and these in turn increased the incentives to invest in the education rather than the number of children, as Becker, Murphy, and Tamura argue. Conclusion on education Rich societies moved far away from their past after more than a century of this development.
Today children are an economic drain rather rather than an asset. This is essentially because in the modern high-skilled economy we require a massive investment in education over many years that only pays off with a long delay.
The rising investments of parents in their children do not only have monetary costs. Additionally the rising importance of children could have increased the time and effort of parents in raising their children. And so we have to resort to qualitative assessments here.
Europeans developed a more romantic view of childhood and of domestic life in general. Educational theorists like Froebel and Pestalozzi emphasized that early childhood is a special time in which play stimulates learning. Women were expected to stay at home to create a refuge for children from the competition and conflict of the world of work.
For the period since Gauthier et al 31 document that the time parents spend with children increased substantially in a sample of 16 industrialized countries for which they examined the data. In popular accounts, it is often argued that in the past and in poor economies parents aim for a large number of children as they will depend on them for support in old age.
This argument cannot have played a large role before the onset of the demographic transition as the stagnation of population growth implies that on average only two children will reach the reproductive age. But even for the time thereafter and more generally there is surprisingly little evidence for this argument given how well it is known. In a study in Indonesia Cameron and Cobb-Clark 33 find only very limited importance of the transfers of children to their parents and emphasize that instead the elderly are mostly relying on their own labor income even at an old age.
During the period of the demographic transition when mortality was low and fertility high however there is some evidence for the importance of children for old-age support from the US where Sundstrom and David 34 documented the importance of children for the old-age support of the parents before the civil war. Also Billari and Galasso 35 examine the effect of a pension reform in the s in Italy and find evidence that pensions and children are to some extent substitutes when it comes to support in old age.
Overall however the demand for children arising out of a need for support in old age is likely to be less important than other factors examined here. The following plot shows the close relation between the income level measured by GDP per capita and the total fertility rate. Shown are not just country averages of the fertility rate and income, the visualization is also showing the within-country inequality. Unfortunately there is no data available to do this perfectly and I had to combine income and wealth data to approximate the relationship: The fertility rate by the wealth quintile in each country is plotted against the respective income quintile in each country.
The match is imperfect because I am assuming that each household is in the same income and wealth quintile and this is only an approximation of reality.
The reflex of many economists when thinking about the fertility rate is to point to income as the likely determinant.
And sure enough, between countries and over time we see that higher incomes are associated with lower fertility. But good things come together — richer countries are also healthier and better educated — and so this correlation between high incomes and low fertility alone is surely not evidence that it is increasing income that is responsible for the decrease in fertility.
In fact we have already explored several third factors. Most obviously, a higher level of education of a population is a factor that contributes to higher prosperity and a lower number of children. And a second set of changes — technological change, lower child labour, and the structural change of the economy — comes along with economic growth and lowers the demand of parents for children, as we have seen.
But still there might also be a direct effect of increasing prosperity on the declining demand for children. Higher incomes make different, more varied lifestyles possible, which might convince prospective parents to have fewer or no children. Wealthy families responded by consuming more of these new products and services instead of producing children.
The correlation that we see in this visualization is therefore partly driven by a direct link between income and the number of children parents want, but to a large extent also by changes that correlate with prosperity and fertility rates. The change of fertility are a prime example for changing social norms. In many places around the world the practice of having more than 5, 6, 7, or 8 children, which was the norm for millennia, was replaced by the norm of having 2 children or fewer.
We have explored socio-economic and technological changes that contributed to the declining rate of fertility, but there is also evidence for the importance of cultural changes which had a direct impact on how this norm changed. The influences on social norms are hard to study as social changes can be rarely separated into causes and consequences. But sometimes there are possibilities to investigate how social norms change. A number of researchers looked at the effect of new media becoming available:.
Television is not only providing entertainment, it also exposes the viewers to very different ways of life. For rural, poor, illiterate populations television is the primary way to be informed about the ways of life of people that live very differently. The lives depicted in television shows are in stark contrast to the reality back home. They are often in urban settings and feature female characters with higher education that work outside the household and who have smaller families.
The researchers La Ferrara, Chong, and Duryea 37 studied the impact of television on the fertility rate in Brazil. These are much fewer children than the average in Brazil over the same time: The fertility rate in was 5. The researchers were able to identify the effect of the telenovelas as the TV network was only gradually expanded through the country.
The entry in each new area allowed the researchers to study the impact of television again and again. After controlling for socio-economic variables the authors find that the exposure to coverage by Globo is associated with a decrease in the probability of giving birth of 0.
This effect was strongest for the poorer, less educated women for which the difference to the lifestyles shown on TV is largest. All these effects are not large when compared to the very substantial reductions of the number of births per woman over the long run. The role of social norms in lowering the fertility rate might not be only at work in poorer world regions today, but might have actually contributed to the decline of the fertility rate of the countries which first underwent the demographic transition.
The decline of the fertility rate started in France earlier than in other countries. Even countries where the populations were richer and more educated at the time had a higher fertility rate than the French population.
The fact that France was the first European region in which women started to have fewer children is shown in the map. But the claim is not only that France was special in first experiencing this decline, but also the origin of social norms that lead to declines elsewhere. An indication for the cultural diffusion of social norms originating in France is the empirical finding that language barriers mattered for the timing of the decline of the total fertility rate.
Belgium, divided into Flemish- and French-speaking regions, shows most clearly the importance of linguistic borders. Lesthaeghe studied seventy Walloon villages matched to neighboring Flemish villages with identical economic conditions.
Fertility fell first in the Walloon village in sixty-two of the pairs, and the fertility decline began twenty years earlier on average in the Walloon village Lesthaeghe, Flemish couples in the city of Leuven were more likely to have small families if a migrant from Wallonia lived nearby Van Bavel, Ron J. Lesthaeghe 42 has suggested that the cultural change towards lower numbers of children might not only be due to socio-economic changes, but might have been also driven by the spread of Enlightenment ideas and the simultaneous turning away from the pro-natalist doctrines of the Christian religion in Europe.
Many religious teachings are asking the believers to have a large number of children. This visualization shows the children per woman plotted against the share of children that die in the first 5 years of life.
Each country here is colored according to the largest religious group in that country. The obvious relationship here is that in countries where more children survive, fertility is lower.
Which religion dominates in a country has no clear relation to the fertility level — and even if does have some importance the correlation is much weaker than that with the health of children.
Countries with a majority Christian population have fertility rates as high as 6 DR Congo and as low as 1. Across countries fertility rates vary within and not between religions.
And what is true between countries is even more obvious for the change over time. Religious background cannot explain the rapid change in the level of fertility that we saw. Explanations that refer to the cultural background of a population regularly run into this problem that they can hardly explain the very fast socio-economic changes over time. Despite the ascribed values of a particular religion we have seen changes that are at odds with these: In catholic Italy the fertility declined from 2.
As it is so often the case with explanations for social phenomena, the importance of culture is easily overestimated. While the big differences between countries today and changes over time are not determined by religion it would be wrong to say that religion has no importance for the number of children women have.
Still, the differences between religions within the same country are much smaller than the differences between different countries in different socio-economic conditions. We can see how much more living conditions matter than the religion. And then there have been some small highly religious sub-populations in which religious teaching had a very substantial effect on fertility rates.
The highest total fertility rate that I found for any population in human history was for the Hutterites — a group of Christians with origins in Tyrol — where, in the early twentieth century, married Hutterite women in North America had on average Family planning refers to all active efforts to choose the number of children a woman or family wants.
While the changes discussed before changed the incentives for having a larger or smaller number of children, family planning is focussed on the decision making and implementation of that decision on the personal level. Why family planning is highly important today is to consider the share of pregnancies that are unwanted. The number of pregnancies that are unintended is very high. For the year — the last year for which we have data — it is estimated 47 that 85 million pregnancies were unwanted.
These are 40 percent of all million pregnancies in that year. Of these 85 million pregnancies 50 percent ended in abortion, 13 percent ended in miscarriage, and 38 percent resulted in an unplanned birth. This means that 32 million children are born unplanned every year. A second way of looking at this is to study the discrepancy between the wanted fertility rate and the actual fertility rate:.
Access to family planning and safe and confidential access to modern methods of contraception can reduce the number of unintended births. But a goal of lower fertility is irrelevant if there are no means to achieve it. Methods of contraception give parents the chance to get the actual fertility closer to their desired fertility. This map shows where women have access to these methods. Better education of women matters again as research shows that better education can increase the understanding and acceptance of contraceptive methods and the ability to use contraception effectively.
Martha Bailey 51 studied the timing of legal access to birth control across US states and finds that the availability of the Pill substantially accelerated the post decline in marital fertility. Based on her analysis Bailey argues 40 percent — or even more — of the total change in the marital fertility rate in the decade between and can be attributed to the availability of the Pill.
And again, this driver of lower fertility rates is complementing other factors discussed above that contributed to lower fertility rates. Goldin and Katz argue that the availability of modern contraceptive methods contributed to the increased opportunities of women. With the development of low-cost, safe methods of contraception have become more widely available in recent decades. But as the map shows there is still a substantial unmet need for contraception in many parts of the world.
In this chart we see the relationship between fertility rates and the use of contraception. This is shown as the average children per woman versus contraception prevalence based on the use of any method of contraception. Here we see a negative relationship: in countries where contraception use is low, the number of children per woman is higher. As contraception becomes more widely used, the number of children per woman declines. We can also see this when we compare the unmet need for contraception with fertility rates : the average children per woman is high where the unmet need for contraception is also high.
This effect persisted for at least two decades and additional positive effects on the health and nutritional status of the children. Family planning advice surely can work as the impressive case of Iran shows, in Iran had a fertility rate of 6. But was the policy necessary to drive down fertility?
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