The mid-twentieth century Baby Boom and the changing educational gradient in Belgian cohort fertility

Educational differentials on the transition to first birth in South Korea

Drawing on two competing frameworks, the leader-follower model and the permanent-difference model, this study examines the educational gradient in the transition to first birth across birth cohorts in South Korea. The leader-follower model suggests that low fertility behaviour would spread from more educated women to their less educated counterparts, whereas the permanent-difference model posits that the gaps in fertility between education groups would remain distinct over time. Using nationally representative panel data of 7914 women (130,078 person-years) born between 1960 and 1984, results from discrete-time survival analysis show an initial convergence of gaps in fertility between education groups, but the gaps are now re-emerging and widening. Substantial gaps in fertility are found in younger birth cohorts born between 1975 and 1984. The convergence-divergence pattern observed over time highlights the importance of recognising how women's changing educational profile affects fertility in an ultra-low fertility setting.

Revisiting mid-twentieth-century fertility shifts from a global perspective

In the developed world, the historic process of fertility decline was interrupted by an unexpected period of increasing fertility called the baby boom. Recent studies suggest that a similar trend change in fertility may have occurred in many less developed nations at approximately the same time. Using cohort fertility data for 26 less developed countries from around the world taken from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, International (IPUMS-I), this paper aims to ascertain the extent to which these trend changes occurred in a large sample of countries around the world. It offers convincing proof of the existence of an upward shift in fertility among cohorts born during the 1930s, which was common to many countries in the less developed world. Despite many similarities with the baby boom, there are also differences stemming, mostly, from its timing with respect to the demographic transition.

Seeding the gender revolution: Women's education and cohort fertility among the baby boom generations

In Europe and the United States, women's educational attainment started to increase around the middle of the twentieth century. The expected implication was fertility decline and postponement, whereas in fact the opposite occurred. We analyse trends in the quantum of cohort fertility among the baby boom generations in 15 countries and how these relate to women's education. Over the 1901-45 cohorts, the proportion of parents with exactly two children rose steadily and homogeneity in family sizes increased. Progression to a third child and beyond declined in all the countries, continuing the ongoing trends of the fertility transition. In countries with a baby boom, and especially among women with post-primary education, this was compensated for by decreasing childlessness and increasing progression to a second child. These changes, linked to earlier stages of the fertility transition, laid the foundations for later fertility patterns associated with the gender revolution.

The mechanics of the baby boom: Unveiling the role of the epidemiologic transition

Recent research on the baby boom and its causes has shown that common explanations, such as the recuperation of births following the Great Depression or Second World War, are not sufficient to account for the phenomenon. However, that research has stressed the role of increasing nuptiality. In this paper, we argue that the increase in survivorship of children and young people that resulted from the epidemiologic transition accounted for a large portion of the increased number of births during the baby boom. We use a microsimulation model to assess the respective roles of mortality, nuptiality, fertility, and immigration on the size and dynamics of the boom in Quebec, Canada. Results show that decreasing mortality contributed significantly to the baby boom, along with immigration and nuptiality changes, while fertility rates attenuated the phenomenon. These results substantiate the hypothesis that the epidemiologic transition was an important cause of the baby boom.

The limited effect of increasing educational attainment on childlessness trends in twentieth-century Europe, women born 1916-65

During the twentieth century, trends in childlessness varied strongly across European countries while educational attainment grew continuously across them. Using census and large-scale survey data from 13 European countries, we investigated the relationship between these two factors among women born between 1916 and 1965. Up to the 1940 birth cohort, the share of women childless at age 40+ decreased universally. Afterwards, the trends diverged across countries. The results suggest that the overall trends were related mainly to changing rates of childlessness within educational groups and only marginally to changes in the educational composition of the population. Over time, childlessness levels of the medium-educated and high-educated became closer to those of the low-educated, but the difference in level between the two better educated groups remained stable in Western and Southern Europe and increased slightly in the East.

Le baby-boom québécois : l’importance du mariage

Le baby-boom est un phénomène marquant du xxe siècle dans la plupart des pays industrialisés. Au Québec, il se distingue parce qu’il combine l’augmentation de la fécondité générale et la baisse de la fécondité des couples mariés : ainsi, le baby-boom a lieu parce que plus de gens se marient et se marient plus tôt, même s’ils ont moins d’enfants que leurs parents. Ce paradoxe a été mis en évidence par Jacques Henripin dans sa monographie du recensement de 1961 sur la fécondité au Canada. Nous utilisons les données rétrospectives du recensement de 1981 afin d’analyser plus finement les comportements de nuptialité des femmes et des hommes pendant le baby-boom en nous concentrant sur les différences entre groupes ethnoreligieux et de niveaux de scolarité. Les transformations les plus importantes consistent en un rajeunissement généralisé de l’âge au mariage et, chez les femmes et les francophones les plus scolarisés surtout, en une augmentation de la propension à se marier. Il s’ensuit que les écarts entre groupes ethnoreligieux et entre niveaux de scolarité diminuent considérablement. Le baby-boom québécois semble donc avoir été causé d’abord et avant tout par le mariage plus précoce dans tous les groupes et l’augmentation de la nuptialité dans certains groupes seulement.