Abstract
The decline in human fertility during the demographic transition is one of the most profound changes to human living conditions. To gain a better understanding of this transition we investigate the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and marital fertility in different fertility regimes in a global and historical perspective. We use data for a large number women in 91 different countries for the period 1703–2018 (N = 116,612,473). In the pre-transitional fertility regime the highest SES group had somewhat lower marital fertility than other groups both in terms of children ever born (CEB) and number of surviving children under 5 (CWR). Over the course of the fertility transition, as measured by the different fertility regimes, these rather small initial SES differentials in marital fertility widened, both for CEB and CWR. There was no indication of a convergence in marital fertility by SES in the later stages of the transition. Our results imply a universally negative association between SES and marital fertility and that the fertility differentials widened during the fertility transition.
Highlights
Understanding the global fertility transition has been one of the main research tasks in demography
Results are reported as Incidence Rate Ratios (IRR), which are the exponentiated parameter estimates
Since marital fertility could be lower for couples in which husbands were much older than their wives, the models adjusted for the age difference between the spouses
Summary
Understanding the global fertility transition has been one of the main research tasks in demography. The importance of women’s education has been at the forefront of this research (Bongaarts 2003; Caldwell 1982; Castro Martín and Juárez 1995; Cleland 2002; Jejeebhoy 1995; Schultz 1997), even though there has been studies on fertility differentials by other dimensions of socioeconomic status (SES), often occupation or wealth. On a more general level, they tell us something about the living conditions of men and women in different groups in society. What they tell us is, highly contextdependent. Fertility differentials by SES, and how they evolved over the fertility transition, are important to fully understand the causes of the fertility decline; one of the most important discontinuities in human history (Dribe et al 2017)
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