The Decline of Fertility in Europe: The Revised Proceedings of a Conference on the Princeton European Fertility Project.

Abstract

These conference proceedings report on the culmination but not the termination of the Princeton research project on the fertility decline within each of several hundred provinces in Europe. Even before the projects beginning in 1963 Princetons office of Population Research produced books and dissertations on the European fertility decline. The extensive historical demographic statistics of high quality available for Europe made it possible to systematically extend Leasures approach to Spanish fertility decline to the several hundred provinces of Europe from the period preceding fertility decline through the major fertility changes. Prior to the 1979 conference 6 books and many articles were written as a part of this project. Since a synthesis of all this reasearch exceeded a reasonable research agenda for any single individual it was decided to hold a conference for those who had written books and those who were particularly interested in the subject. Authors who had previously written on the subject were asked to contribute papers not on the countries they had already written about but on interrelations that extended to several countries. This volume also includes colored maps showing the geographic distribution of the estimated date of the beginning of the marital fertility decline in European provinces.