The Delayed Fertility Transition in North-East Italy

Abstract

The transitional decline of fertility in Italy has never been studied using micro-data, with the exception of small areas. For the first time, we use individual retrospective fertility data collected for all the ever married women living in 20 % of households subjected to census in 1971 in the Veneto region (North-East Italy), a ‘late-comer’ area in the context of Western European fertility decline (TFR = 5.0 in 1871 and 1921, 2.5 in 1951 and 1971). In order to consider broad explanations of fertility decline, we combine individual retrospective data with other information available at two territorial levels (58 districts and 582 municipalities), using a three-level clustered regression model (district, municipality, woman). The main results are: (1) even if the (few) women with 8 + years of schooling born in the last decades of the nineteenth century already had a TFR around two, this value is not seen among women with low levels of education until those born 50 years later; (2) the link between fertility and secularization strengthens cohort after cohort, whereas the connections between fertility and industrialization and fertility and urbanization weaken; (3) throughout the period, the statistical inverse relationship between education and fertility is strong, both at the territorial and individual level.