Introduction This paper addresses the issue of very low fertility in countries with advanced economies including its consequences and its causes. It ends with a discussion of policy approaches to reverse very low fertility. Very low fertility is defined as being fertility sustained for a long period below 1.5 births per woman. It is recognized that annual fertility rates are affected by changes...

BACKGROUND The Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is defined as the average number of births a woman would have if she were to live throughout the reproductive span and bear children at each age at the rates observed in a particular year or period. The current demographic explanation for decline in TFR is primarily attributed to an increase in postponement in pregnancy. Being cross-sectional, fertility...

The paper proposes that whether period indicators are biased by timing effects depends on the objective of measurement. Several kinds of bias in the TFR are identified. Five reasons for measuring period fertility are distinguished: to explain fertility time trends, to anticipate future prospects, to describe trends, to provide input parameters for formal models, and to communicate with non-spec...

Bongaarts and Feeney offer alternatives to period life expectancy with a set of demographic measures equivalent to each other under a Proportionality Assumption. Under this assumption, we show that the measures are given by exponentially weighted moving averages of earlier values of period life expectancy. They are indices of mortality conditions in the recent past. The period life expectancy i...

Using detailed data on period and cohort fertility in four European countries, this paper discusses various indicators of period fertility, including indicators adjusted for changes in fertility timing. Empirical analysis focuses on the comparison of cohort fertility and corresponding indicators of period fertility; particular attention is paid to the periods of intensive postponement of childb...

Five reasons for measuring period fertility are distinguished: to describe fertility time trends, to explain these, to anticipate future population prospects, to provide input parameters for formal models, and to communicate with non-specialist audiences. The paper argues that not all measures are suitable for each purpose, and that tempo adjustment may be appropriate for some objectives but no...

Low fertility is a pervasive phenomenon. All European countries currently experience below-replacement fertility levels, and the proportion of the world’s population living in a low fertility context continues to increase. The purpose of this contribution is to rethink demographic methods for the analysis of fertility from the perspective of recent research on low fertility and to assess data r...

Demographers have known since the 1940s that standard measures of period fertility, such as the widely used total fertility rate, are distorted by changes in the timing of childbearing. Period fertility rates are depressed during years in which women delay childbearing and inflated in years when childbearing is accelerated. This problem is usually ignored because there has been no generally acc...

The rise in educational enrolment is often cited as a possible cause of the trend to later childbearing in developed societies but direct evidence of its contribution to the aggregate change in fertility tempo is scarce. We show that rising enrolment, resulting in later ages at the end of education, accounts for a substantial part of the upward shift in the mean age at first birth in the 1980s ...

In this paper we introduce a new set of tempo-adjusted period parity progression measures in order to account for two distinct implications caused by delays in childbearing: tempo distortions imply an underestimation of the quantum of fertility in observed period data, and the fertility aging effect reduces higher parity births because the respective exposure is shifted to older ages when the p...