Fertility In Norway Research Articles

Understanding the Positive Effects of the COVID‐19 Pandemic on Women's Fertility in Norway

AbstractThis study examines the effect of the COVID‐19 pandemic on fertility in Norway at the individual level. Studies using data at the macrolevel have found a positive short‐term effect of the pandemic on the fertility level in Norway, but women's fertility response to the pandemic may differ depending on their life situation. We use the first lockdown on March 12, 2020, as a marker of the pandemic and apply a regression discontinuity design to compare births of women that were conceived before the pandemic started with those conceived during the first eight months of the pandemic. The positive effect on women's fertility in Norway was mainly driven by women in life phases that have generally high fertility rates (women aged 28–35 years and women who already have children). These groups are likely to be in an economically and socially secure and stable situation in which the restrictions due to the pandemic had limited influence. Besides two exceptions, we do not find differences in the effect of the pandemic on childbearing by women's work situation. This is most likely related to the strong welfare state and the generous additional pandemic‐related measures taken by the Norwegian government.

Childhood hearing impairment and fertility in Norway

There is a lack of studies assessing how hearing impairment relates to reproductive outcomes. We examined whether childhood hearing impairment (HI) affects reproductive patterns based on longitudinal Norwegian population level data for birth cohorts 1940–1980. We used Poisson regression to estimate the association between the number of children ever born and HI. The association with childlessness is estimated by a logit model. As a robustness check, we also estimated family fixed effects Poisson and logit models. Hearing was assessed at ages 7, 10 and 13, and reproduction was observed at adult ages until 2014. Air conduction hearing threshold levels were obtained by pure-tone audiometry at eight frequencies from 0.25 to 8 kHz. Fertility data were collected from Norwegian administrative registers. The combined dataset size was N = 50,022. Our analyses reveal that HI in childhood is associated with lower fertility in adulthood, especially for men. The proportion of childless individuals among those with childhood HI was almost twice as large as that of individuals with normal childhood hearing (20.8% vs. 10.7%). The negative association is robust to the inclusion of family fixed effects in the model that allow to control for the unobserved heterogeneity that are shared between siblings, including factors related to the upbringing and parent characteristics. Less family support in later life could add to the health challenges faced by those with HI. More attention should be given to how fertility relates to HI.

Impact of a Reform Towards Shared Parental Leave on Continued Fertility in Norway and Sweden

It has been argued that a generous family policy aimed at a gender-equal division of childcare and economic responsibility will have a positive impact on childbearing. In this study, we investigate whether fathers’ parental leave use is related to continued childbearing and whether there has been a policy effect on fertility behavior due to the introduction of the father’s quota in Norway and Sweden. Fathers’ parental leave use may affect fertility by easing women’s work burden at home and thus enhancing the degree of compatibility between childrearing and female employment, and it may increase fathers’ interest in children and childcare. To distinguish causality from selection in the effects observed, we use the natural experiment of the introduction of the father’s quotas. The results indicate that the reforms did not influence fertility in Norway but that Swedish couples with a lower income had a temporary higher third-birth risk. Fathers in this group showed the greatest increase in leave use after the reform.

Institutional Trust: Family Policy and Fertility in Norway

In considering the systemic properties of family policies through the analytical lens of institutional trust, this study brings new insights into the relationship between family policy and fertility. In the Norwegian welfare state, trust in the family policy system permeates young adults’ reasoning about having children: these adults take the family policy system for granted and trust that it will work out, in effect lowering the threshold to entry to parenthood. The data for the analysis come from ninety semi-structured interviews among women and men in working-class and upper middle-class occupations.

Politique familiale et fécondité en Norvège : une question de genre et de classe sociale

Family policy and fertility in Norway : a gender and class perspective. What importance do young adults attribute to family policy arrangements in the choice about having children ? Does family policy feature differently in the reasoning among women and men and across social classes ? This qualitative study of 90 young adults in Norway finds that contrary to common expectations, young adults consider family policy arrangements being of little impact on their own choice to have a child. But this apparent insignificance paradoxically may be the strongest evidence of how crucial it actually is. The policy arrangements are being taken for granted, ingrained in young adults’ horizon of expectations : Welfare state arrangements constitute a key foundation of the organisation of parenthood, based on a dual earner provider model.

Child‐Care Availability and Fertility in Norway

The child-care and fertility hypothesis has been in the literature for a long time and is straightforward: As child care becomes more available, affordable, and acceptable, the antinatalist effects of increased female educational attainment and work opportunities decrease. As an increasing number of countries express concern about low fertility, the child-care and fertility hypothesis takes on increased importance. Yet data and statistical limitations have heretofore limited empirical tests of the hypothesis. Using rich longitudinal data and appropriate statistical methodology, We show that increased availability of child care increases completed fertility. Moreover, this positive effect of child-care availability is found at every parity transition. We discuss the generalizability of these results to other settings and their broader importance for understanding variation and trends in low fertility.

Family Policies and Fertility in Norway

We address the relationship between family policies and fertility in Norway, including three somewhat different policies: parental leave, formal childcare, and the childcare cash benefit. We use administrative register data covering the period 1995–2004. Norwegian family policies are designed both to improve reconciliation of work and family and to improve childcare choices for parents. The analysis shows different patterns of work–family reconciliation and fertility choices among one-child couples and two-child couples. The parental leave policy is the most influential of the three policies on second-birth intensities, especially if parental leave is also taken by the father. The introduction of the childcare cash benefit is most influential on third-birth intensities. This means that policies that promote paternal involvement in childcare and gender equality are positively associated with second births, while policies giving more general family support are positively associated with third births.

Abortion, Birth Control, and Contraception: Fertility Decline in Norway

Between 1890 and 1930, fertility in Norway was halved; four variables accounted for 63 percent of explained variance. Socioeconomic factors were clearly more important than cultural ones—a finding that does not necessarily contradict results found in other studies: Within a homogenous cultural framework, fertility decline tends to follow socioeconomic development. Qualitative findings corroborate the regression analysis: Districts where women made their earliest and most active use of the right to vote for Parliament—obtained in 1913—also pioneered early fertility decline.

The impact of individual and aggregate unemployment on fertility in Norway

Continuous-time hazard models are estimated from register-based birth, migration, education and unemployment histories for the complete Norwegian population, linked with aggregate data for municipalities. The analysis covers the period 1992-98. First-birth rates are slightly higher among women who had been unemployed twelve months before than among others, whereas higher-order birth rates are slightly lower. Although men’s unemployment has a more pronounced negative effect, according to paternity rate models, the overall conclusion is that unemployment in Norway has had a negligible impact on fertility through individual-level effects. Aggregate-level effects are more important. Higher-order birth rates are lower in municipalities where men’s or women’s unemployment is high than elsewhere. All in all, the peak unemployment level of 6% experienced in 1993 is found to be associated with a reduction of about 0.08 in total fertility. The results accord well with economic theories for first and higher-order births that are based on the assumption that women are still the primary caretakers.

How the local supply of day-care centers influences fertility in Norway: A parity-specific approach

In order to assess how expansion of day care facilities affects fertility, the Norwegian Family and Occupation Survey of 1988 was linked with individual register-based migration histories and time-series data on day-care coverage rates in all Norwegian municipalities. Many factors affect both the allocation of resources to day-care centers and a woman's probability of giving birth. The local coverage rate is positively associated with the probability of advancing from parity two, after control for geographical region, degree of urbanization and other confoun- ders. This effect of day-care supply, which is significant at low coverage levels, contributed to a moderate rise in third-birth rates after the mid-1970s. However, if the aggregate employment rate for women is also regarded as a confounder, the effect of day care may actually be insignificant. Moreover, the effect fades at higher coverage levels. Finally, there are indications that second- and first-birth probabilities decline with increasing provision of day care. These results suggest that further efforts to improve the supply of private and public day care - which in Norway are likely to be motivated by non-demographic concerns - will have little stimulating effect on fertility, at least if the subsidies and quality of care remain unchanged.

Are children poor men's riches?

Abstract Extract Fertility declined fairly simultaneously in most western countries nearly a century ago. The question of which social groups were early in starting the decline is thought to have been answered: the common assertion is that the highest social groups started to control their fertility and, as time passed, that their new reproductive behaviour percolated down through the social layers. The current project on the secular decline in fertility in Norway has revealed that the families at the very top of the social hierarchy were the national pioneers in family limitation. The hypothesis in this article is, however, that family limitation in Norway also had an independent point of departure in the rural lower classes. In this article, I will therefore challenge the ‘general truth’ that there is always an inverse relationship between fertility and social status in the initial phase of the secular decline in fertility.

The decrease of fertility in Norway: The spread of an innovation

Fertility was radically reduced between 1960 and 1970, passing from a uniformly high level, through a transitional stage characterized by great regional diversity, to one of low fertility and moderate regional variation. The first phase can to a considerable extent be ‘explained’ by the varying degree of urbanization in individual provinces, and may be looked upon as the effect of a mainly hierarchic type of diffusion. In later years, variations in urbanization explain less of the regional differences, whereas a marked contrast can be observed between the centrally located East Norway and the rest of the country. The process of change has gradually taken on more of the characteristics of ‘contagious’ diffusion. The regional pattern of fertility shows strong similarity to the regional variations in the attitude to the idea of European integration, as measured through the 1972 referendum vote. The more detailed geographical breakdown of the voting statistics corroborates the importance of the urban-rural va...