Fertility trends in Europe since the second world war

Abstract

Abstract Before discussing the movements in fertility in Europe since World War II, it is necessary to consider, both as a background and a yardstick for measurement, the general situation around the mid-1930's. This period has been chosen for several reasons. First, it was at about this time that the crude birth rates and other period indices of fertility in most Western and North-Western countries of Europe reached their lowest points. The decline initiated in the 1870's and 1880's had proceeded without interruption except for the years immediately after World War I, and had gathered momentum in the 1920's. Only in France, in which the birth rate had been falling throughout the 19th century, did there appear to be some approach to stabilization. Secondly, pro-natalist policies began to expand in France, Belgium and Italy, and were initiated in Germany with the Nazi takeover. The very expansion of such policies reinforced the feeling of impending depopulation in other Western countries, a feeling made more intense by the increasingly frequent use of period net reproduction rates as indicators of national 'vitality' ('true' rates of natural increase were much less frequently cited: they required more elaborate computations and appeared to be less striking). Such rates were regarded as sophisticated and meaningful measures of replacement tendencies and they were given a semi-official status by inclusion in the League of Nations Statistical Yearbooks. The apparent implications of these rates were made even more sharply visible by the publication of population projections constructed on a component basis, and using essentially the same approach as that embodied in net reproduction rates - that is, with fertility measured in terms of age-specific fertility rates, and with no regard paid to nuptiality. Thirdly, the early thirties saw the great economic depression, with its correlate of mass unemployment, and offering a natural economic explanation for at least part of the apparent demographic depression.