The Two Components of Fertility Change: Childlessness and Family Size Among Mothers

Vladimir Canudas-Romo , Australian National University
Ester Lazzari, University of Vienna

Declining total fertility rates (TFR) across many societies are increasingly accompanied by a growing proportion of women who remain childless (proportion childless, PC), indicating fundamental shifts in reproductive behavior and family formation. To analyze these dynamics, we draw on age-specific fertility rates (ASFRs) of first births, to construct reproductive life tables that follow childless women over their reproductive life. This approach enables standardized cross-country comparisons and calculates proportion of women remaining childless at the end of their reproductive life from a period perspective. A new summary measure, denoted TFR+1, corresponds to the average number of children per woman among those who have children. It integrates the information from both TFR and PC to better capture fertility dynamics in low-fertility contexts. Using data from the Human Fertility Database we present changes in TFR, PC and TFR+1, for 36 populations with available information since 2000. Although there was great heterogeneity in results, PC was the major contributor to changes in TFR.

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 Presented in Session 113. Patterns and Components of Fertility Change