Fertility in Italy and Spain: The Lowest in the World

Abstract

A t the beginning of the 1990s, the over 100 million inhabitants of Italy, Spain and Portugal were reproducing at the slowest rate of any large population in the world; the period total fertility rate (TFR) for 1989-1990 was just 1.3-1.4 lifetime births per woman. The 1990 crop of 1.1 million babies born in the Italian and Iberian peninsulas was 26% smaller than that born in France and England, which have the same combined total population. This comment describes and compares fertility trends in Italy and Spain and speculates on the causes of the exceptionally low fertility in these two countries, which have been known for the central role children play in family and society. Contrary to popular belief, Italy and Spain have never had very high levels of fertility. Around 1860 or 1870 (before the onset of the modern fertility transition), levels of fertility among Italian and Spanish women were lower than those among German, Dutch or Belgian women, and were about the same as those of English, Danish and Swedish women.* Nonetheless, 19th-century travelers and observers from Northern Europe mistook the noisy presence of children in the streets, the attention they received from parents and adults, and the active role they took in many rural and urban occupations as signs of unusually high fertility. The data, however, prove otherwise. As Table 1 shows, fertility decline had been firmly established in Italy and Spain by the end of World War I; in fact, fertility control had already been practiced for half a century in many regions. Using the standard definition that a 10% drop in fertility from stable pretransition rates signals that a decline is underway, the beginnings