Economic resources and the first child in Italy: A focus on income and job stability

Abstract

Abstract At the turn of the twentieth century Italy registered a lowest-low fertility level, i.e., a total fertility rate of 1.26 children per woman in 2000. In this paper we investigate whether and how in that period economic resources and, in particular, income and job stability were linked with couples' decisions to enter parenthood. With this aim, we use data from ECHP and carry out a longitudinal analysis on a sample of childless married couples to study the transition to their first child. Results show that the couples' employment arrangement played some role in first child rates, with the single earner arrangement experiencing the highest first birth rates. We also find that employed women with labour income have much lower first birth rates than non-working women, while no evidence is found for male earnings and other sources of income. As concerns job instability, we find evidence that it was not significantly linked with the transition to first time parenthood during the investigated period. 1. Introduction At the end of the twentieth century Italy was characterized by important economic and demographic changes. Firstly, a large increase of educational attainment was observed. In 1995 the proportion of the population aged 25 to 64 that had completed at least upper secondary education was 27%, while in 2002 it was 34% (OECD 2004a). Young women in particular were the protagonists in this increased school attendance. In the meantime great labour market shifts were taking place. Women were significantly increasing their presence in the labour force, mainly due to the tertiarization of the Italian economy: female employment increased by 10.9% between 1995 and 2000 (Istat 2000), so that the male breadwinner model was more and more challenged by the dual earner model. During this period part time jobs were increasing, especially among women: female part-time jobs2 went from 18.4% in 1990 to 23.7% in 2001 (OECD 2004b). However, part-time jobs in Italy were, and still are, rare in comparison with other European countries, and mostly characterized by short-term contracts and high precariousness. Moreover, working hours for part-timers were among the highest in Europe, while full-time working hours were the lowest. Since the turn of the century, the Italian labour market has become more flexible, because of part time jobs. On the other hand, increasing temporary and other fixed-term contracts have made it more precarious. The share of temporary employment3 was 5% in 1990 and had doubled by 2000 (OECD 2002). The amount of temporary employment had increased since the early 1980s, when Italian governments introduced reforms to give greater flexibility to the labour market, making it easier to create temporary jobs, with a marked intensification of such efforts from the late 1990s. Fixed-term contracts and the use of temporary work agencies were liberalized, and these political reforms hit mainly young people and in particular women, because temporary jobs raised the incidence of transitions from unemployment to limited-duration jobs. In this context of transformations demographic behaviours have also changed. The prolonged investment in education and the long search for a stable job delay the family formation phases for young people. They are increasingly postponing leaving the parental home, an event that is closely associated with first union and is mostly coincident with marriage (Billari and Ongaro 1998). At the end of the last century women's increasing presence in the labour market reshaped the gender relationship within couples and increased difficulties in reconciling work and family, with consequences for reproductive choices. At the beginning of the 21st century age at first marriage was very high: in 2001 it was 27.2 years for women and 30.2 years for men. At the same time postponement of parenthood caused a rise of female mean age at the birth of the first child. This was 30 years in 2001, among the highest in Europe (Istat 2009a). …