Educational Gradient and Parity Contribution to Completed Cohort Fertility Decline in Low Fertility Settings

Ester Lazzari , Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital
Ryohei Mogi, University of Oxford
Vladimir Canudas-Romo, Australian National University

Extended literature documents the contribution of rising education to decrease in cohort fertility in virtually all Western industrialized nations, although important variations in their interaction have been noticed over time and in different contexts. A key question related to the education-fertility relationship is to what extent the decrease in fertility can be considered the result of changes in the educational composition and how much is caused by the change in fertility behaviours across educational categories. By using a new demographic-decomposition technique, we quantify the contributions of the educational composition and parity specific components to the changes in cohort fertility rates among women born between 1940 and 1970 in eight low fertility countries. Our results show that the pathways to low and lowest low fertility have distinctive patterns by countries, which reflect the complexity and heterogeneity in the relationship between education and fertility.

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 Presented in Session 129. Education and Fertility