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Europe and its Fertility: From Low to Lowest Low

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2020

Francesco C. Billari
Francesco C. Billari*
Affiliation:
Institute of Quantitative Methods, Università Bocconi and IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research)
*
e-mail: francesco.billari@uni-bocconi.it
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Abstract

This paper documents the fundamental changes in family formation that took place in Europe during the last two decades of the twentieth century, as well as some possible explanations for these changes. First, European youth have postponed key demographic events, and the latest-late pattern of transition to adulthood emerged in the South. Second, lowest-low fertility emerged during the 1990s in the same area, spreading quickly to Central and Eastern Europe. Policies and economic trends, long-standing cultural factors and ideational change interact in shaping change and differences. Macro-level factors in turn interact with micro-level ones to shape outcomes. The new demographic regime of Europe is thus likely to persist.

Keywords

Europetransition to adulthoodlatest-latefertilitylowest-lowJ13J11
Type
Articles
Information
National Institute Economic Review , Volume 194 , October 2005 , pp. 56 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 National Institute of Economic and Social Research

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Footnotes

This is an amended and updated version of the paper ‘Partnership, childbearing and parenting: trends of the 1990s’ (Billari, 2005). The author would like warm thanks to go to Tomas Frejka for personal communications and for having provided the text and data from the Frejka and Sardon (2004) book before its publication; to Chiara de Florio la Rocca for help and assistance; to Eva Bernhardt and Gianpiero Dalla Zuanna for comments; and to Marion Burkimsher for extremely valuable professional editing advice. Of course responsibility for the content of the paper rests solely with the author.

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