Edwin A. Winckler, Research Associate, East Asian Institute, Columbia University In the 1990s, as fertility fell below replacement, China's state birth planning program began reforms, first to improve its state-centric approach to birth limitation and then to incorporate some elements of a more client-centered approach. In 2000 and 2001, as part of a regime shift toward "rule by law," China both further institutionalized and further reformed the program. A March 2000 Decision and a December 2001 Law reaffirm the need for state planning of population and births but mandate a shift in both methods and goals. Methods should shift from direct to indirect regulation, reducing negative effects such as coercion and corruption and increasing positive benefits such as helping poor women develop. Goals should shift from just limiting births toward also delivering reproductive health services. Reforms are occurring also through supporting regulations and changes of procedure within existing regulations. These policies chart a new course for implementation over the next decade. [28, no. 3 (Sep 02): 379–418]
John Bongaarts, Vice President, Policy Research Division, Population Council By the late 1990s the average period total fertility rate in the developed world had declined to 1.6, a level substantially lower than projected in the 1970s and 1980s. This article examines recent trends and patterns in fertility in the developed world with particular emphasis on the effects and implications of changes in the timing of childbearing. The main objective is to demonstrate that while fertility in these countries is indeed low, women's childbearing levels are not as low as period measures such as the total fertility rate suggest. To obtain a full understanding of the various dimensions of fertility change, several indicators are examined, including period and cohort fertility by birth order and childbearing preferences. An analysis of these indicators demonstrates that period fertility measures in many developed countries are temporarily depressed by a rise in the mean age at childbearing. The distortion of the TFR is as great as 0.4 births per woman in Italy and Spain. These effects have been present in many developed countries since the 1970s and could continue for years into the future. But tempo effects are temporary, and once the postponement of childbearing ends—as it eventually must—the corresponding fertility-depressing effect stops, thus putting upward pressure on period fertility. Countries with very low fertility and substantial tempo effects may well experience rises in fertility in the near future if the timing of childbearing stabilizes. Even if this happens, however, it seems unlikely that fertility will rebound to the replacement level. [28, no. 3 (Sep 02): 419–443]
Heather Joshi, Professor of Economic and Developmental Demography in Education, Bedford Group for Lifecourse and Statistical Studies, Institute of Education, London University This article reviews findings of studies by the author and colleagues on relationships between women's work and the reproduction of the British population based on data for female birth cohorts 1922–70. The studies address three questions: (1) How do children affect women's paid work and lifetime earnings? (2) How does women's employment affect the quantity of children born? (3) How does women's employment affect the "quality" of children? The answers are affected by the woman's educational attainment. On question 1, childrearing may often halve lifetime earnings, but seldom for the well educated. By contrast, any effects from employment to childbearing are most apparent in the late motherhood of the well educated. Child quality, as assessed by indicators of child development, benefits from maternal education and suffers little from maternal employment. The economic advantages for children in dual-career families are thus unabated. A widening gulf between mothers will tend to polarize the life chances of their children, unless there are more options to combine employment and childrearing, especially including good-quality child care for those who cannot afford the market price. Education is a powerful influence, but does not alone solve all issues of equity, whether between families or between sexes. [28, no. 3 (Sep 02): 445–474]
Ronald D. Lee, Professor in the Departments of Demography and Economics, University of California at Berkeley
Karen L. Kramer, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, State University of New York at Stony Brook This article examines the relationship between household demographic pressure and interage transfers for a group of Maya subsistence agriculturists in Yucatán, Mexico. The authors use data from a field study conducted in 1992–93 on individual time allocation, relative productivity by age and sex, and caloric costs of activities to estimate age schedules of average consumption and production. Using these, they investigate the net costs of children to their parents and find that children have a negative net asset value up to the time they leave home. The direction of net wealth flows in this group is downward, from older to younger, and in economic terms the internal rate of return to children is highly negative up to the time they leave home. Nonetheless, children play a critically important role in the family's economic life cycle. On average, girls offset 76 percent of their consumption costs before leaving home at age 19, and boys offset 82 percent before leaving home at 22. Without the contributions from children as a group, parents would have to double or triple their work effort during part of the family life cycle if they were to raise the same number of children. By the thirteenth year of the family life cycle, children as a group produce more than half of what they consume in every year, and after the twentieth year children produce more than 80 percent of what they as a group consume. The authors also find that the elderly in the sample, ages 50 to 65, produce more than they consume. Thus while children have a negative net asset value to parents, the timing of their children's economic contribution across the family life cycle plays a key role in underwriting the cost of large families. [28, no. 3 (Sep 02): 475–499]
S. Jay Olshansky, Professor, School of Public Health, University of Illinois at Chicago
Bruce A. Carnes, Senior Scientist, Center on Aging, National Opinion Research Center
Jacob Brody, Professor, School of Public Health, University of Illinois at Chicago The life span of individuals and the life expectancy of the populations they comprise have always been topics of interest to scientists and the lay population. In modern times, forecasts of life span and life expectancy have become particularly important public policy issues because of their influence on the future solvency of age-entitlement programs. The authors present a brief discussion of the origin of the notion of life span, discuss its relevance and importance in light of recent developments in the emerging field of the biodemography of aging, and explore the theoretical and biological forces that influence the duration of life of sexually reproducing species. [28, no. 3 (Sep 02): 501–513]
Muslim and Non-Muslim Differences in Female Autonomy and Fertility: Evidence from Four Asian Countries
S. Philip Morgan, Professor of Sociology, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
Sharon Stash, Program Officer, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle, Washington
Herbert L. Smith, Associate Dean for the Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology, Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
Karen Oppenheim Mason, Director, Gender and Development, The World Bank, Washington, DC On the basis of research on paired Muslim and non-Muslim communities selected in India, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines, the authors test the hypothesis that greater observed Muslim pronatalism can be explained by less power or lower autonomy among Muslim women. Indeed, wives in the Muslim communities, compared to the non-Muslim ones: (1) had more children, (2) were more likely to desire additional children, and (3) if they desired no more children, were less likely to be using contraception. However, the authors do not find that Muslim communities consistently score lower on dimensions of women's power/autonomy. Thus, aggregate-level comparisons provide little evidence of a relationship between lower autonomy and higher fertility. Individual-level multivariate analysis of married women in these paired settings similarly suggests that women's autonomy differentials do not account for the higher fertility, demand for more children, and less use of contraception among Muslim wives. These results suggest that explanations for Muslim/non-Muslim fertility differences lie elsewhere. [28, no. 3 (Sep 02): 515–537]
Max Singer, Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute, Washington, DC Past interest in long-range global population projections has been almost exclusively centered on future population size and, to some extent, on changes in the age structure. Uncertainties concerning future demographic dynamics are typically dealt with by preparing multiple projections, distinguished by differing fertility trajectories ranging from high to low. The usual assumption, that the constituting units of the global population—countries and regions—all follow the same variant projection (such as high or low), masks another potential uncertainty of future population dynamics: uncertainty in the composition of the global total by the relative sizes of its constituting units. Using a set of long-range population projections covering the period 2000–2100, this note explores plausible ranges of this uncertainty with reference to six constituting units of the global population. [28, no. 3 (Sep 02): 537–548]
Archives- Pierre Bourdieu on Marriage Strategies
- Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective , reviewed by John C. Caldwell
- Anna Treves, Le nascite e la politica nell'Italia del Novecento, reviewed by Carl Ipsen
- Carol Blum, Strength in Numbers: Population, Reproduction, and Power in Eighteenth-Century France, reviewed by Etienne van de Walle
- James Q. Wilson, The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families, reviewed by Andrew J. Cherlin
- Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, reviewed by Suzanne Bianchi
- Rose E. Frisch, Female Fertility and the Body Fat Connection, reviewed by Nathan Keyfitz
- Laurel Bossen, Chinese Women and Rural Development: Sixty Years of Change in Lu Village, Yunnan
- Fabrizio Butera and Gabriel Mugny (eds.), Social Influence in Social Reality: Promoting Individual and Social Change
- Harold Coward and Daniel C. Maguire (eds.), Visions of a New Earth: Religious Perspectives on Population, Consumption, and Ecology
- Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach
- Fred C. Pampel, The Institutional Context of Population Change: Patterns of Fertility and Mortality across High-Income Nations
- Demetrios G. Papademetriou and Deborah Waller Meyers (eds.), Caught in the Middle: Border Communities in an Era of Globalization
- Per Pinstrup-Andersen and Ebbe Schiøler, Seeds of Contention: World Hunger and the Global Controversy over GM Crops
- Walter Scheidel (ed.), Debating Roman Demography
- People's Republic of China Law on Population and Birth Planning
- Demographic Data on the Victims of the September 11, 2001 Terror Attack on the World Trade Center, New York City
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