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BACKGROUND: The long-term decline in cohort fertility in highly developed countries has been widely documented. However, no systematic analysis has investigated which parity contributed most to the fertility decline to low and very low levels. Objective: We examine how the contribution of changing parity progression ratios varied across cohorts, countries, and broader regions in Europe, North America, Australia, and East Asia. We pay special attention to countries that reached very low completed cohort fertility, below 1.75 children per woman. Methods: Using population censuses and large-scale surveys for 32 low fertility countries, we decompose the change in completed cohort fertility among women born between 1940 and 1970. The decomposition method takes into account the sequential nature of childbearing as a chain of transitions from lower to higher parities. Results: Among women born between 1940 and 1955, the fertility decline was mostly driven by reductions in the progression ratios to third and higher-order births. By contrast, among women born between 1955 and 1970, changes in fertility showed distinct regional patterns: In Central and Eastern Europe they were fuelled by falling second-birth rates, whereas in the German-speaking countries, Southern Europe, and East Asia decreases in first-birth rates played the major role. Conclusions: Pathways to low and very low fertility show distinct geographical patterns, which reflect the diversity of the cultural, socioeconomic, and institutional settings of low fertility countries. Contribution: Our study highlights the importance of analysing parity-specific components of fertility in order to understand fertility change and variation. We demonstrate that similar low levels of completed cohort fertility can result from different combinations of parity-specific fertility rates.

abstract: Evolutionary and economic theories of fertility variation argue that novel subsistence opportunities associated with market economies shape reproduction in ways that both increase parental investment per child and lower overall fertility. I use demographic and ethnographic data from Guatemala as a case study to illustrate how ethnic inequalities in accessing market opportunities have shaped demographic variation and the perceptions of parental investments. I then discuss two projects that use secondary data sets to address issues of conceptualizing and operationalizing market opportunities in national and cross-population comparative work. The first argues that social relationships are critical means of accessing market opportunities, and uses Guatemala household stocks of certain forms of relational wealth are associated with greater parental investments in education. The second focuses on a methodological issue in how common measures of wealth in comparative demographic studies conflate economic capacity with market opportunities, and how this conceptual confusion biases our interpretations of the observed links between wealth and fertility over the course of the demographic transition. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Anthropology 2019

In the wake of declining fertility rates observed across numerous Western countries following the Great Recession, fertility research has increasingly focused on subjective dimensions of economic uncertainty in attempting to explain contemporary fertility dynamics. While the existing literature has primarily examined subjective economic uncertainty in terms of perceived employment stability, recent arguments have been made that resilience toward employment loss might have more salient effects on fertility intentions. Following these arguments, this thesis aims to provide further insight into the current fertility decline in Sweden by examining the relationship between perceived resilience and fertility intentions among Swedish childless couples. Utilizing cross-sectional data from the Swedish Generations and Gender Survey 2021, logistic regression is employed to examine the association between resilience and fertility intentions and how it varies across sociodemographic/socioeconomic groups and individual perceptions of employment stability and risk attitudes. Logistic regression models indicate that being unsure regarding one’s resilience is associated with lower fertility intentions for men, with no similar association found for women. This effect of uncertainty regarding one’s resilience is further suggested to be isolated to foreign-born individuals. Although clear associations between low resilience and fertility intentions are not evident overall, they may be observed among the economically vulnerable. Theoretically, these findings are suggested to reflect a difference in perceived risks and uncertainty, where it is more an inability to foresee future risks than an expected future risk that could inhibit the formation of fertility plans for individuals. Although the results suggest that resilience may play a role in the Swedish fertility decline, the limited sample and cross-sectional nature of the data preclude definitive conclusions regarding the extent of this role.