Rising Educational Participation and the Trend to Later Childbearing

HOW FAR CAN THE shift to later childbearing in developed countries be accounted for by the growth in educational participation? A move to later childbearing has been a conspicuous feature of fertility trends in developed countries for many decades, and over that same period educational participation rates have risen substantially (OECD 2014, 2016a). The rising age at birth is often described as fertility postponement and is primarily due to a progressively later start to childbearing. Fewer women have been starting a family in their teens and early 20s and more have been delaying the start of parenthood to their late 20s and 30s (d’Addio and Mira d’Ercole 2005; OECD 2016b). The consequence is a decline in the first birth rates of childless women at younger ages, followed, in most cases, by a rise in parityspecific rates at older ages, resulting in a general shift up the age scale in the timetable of parenthood. In the West, the mean age at first birth began rising in the 1970s; in Eastern Europe, the trend began in the 1990s, following political and societal transformation (see Figures 1a and 1b). Later childbearing is emerging more recently as a feature of population trends in Southeast Asia and Latin America (Rosero-Bixby et al. 2009; Frejka et al. 2010). The postponement of childbearing in developed countries has been sizable and sustained. This has demographic importance for a number of reasons. Change in the mean age at first birth makes time trends in fertility harder to interpret. The indicator most widely used to measure such trends, the period total fertility rate (TFR), is influenced by shifts in fertility tempo. Tempo change increases the difficulty of assessing the extent towhich trends in the TFR reflect change in the level of fertility or only in its timing, or in some combination of the two. Considerable technical ingenuity and debate have been devoted to this problem in the last two decades (see especially Bongaarts and Feeney 1998 and associated commentary; Schoen 2004; several chapters in Barbi et al. 2008; Ní Bhrolcháin 2011). The postponement