BACKGROUND Marriage is a significant event in life-course of individuals, and creates a system that characterizes societal and economic structures. Marital patterns and dynamics over the years have changed a lot, with decreasing proportions of marriage, increased levels of divorce and co-habitation in developing countries. Although, such changes have been reported in African societies including...

Japan’s TFR in 2004 was 1.29, which is “lowest-low” fertility, i.e. having a TFR of 1.3 or less. It seems to be impossible for cohorts born after 1960 to achieve the complete fertility of their predecessors. The delay in childbearing was accelerated again after 2000. It was shown that both nuptiality and marital fertility contributed to the recent fertility decline. For marital fertility, it wa...

Fertility in rural areas such as the Governorate of Menoufia in Egypt may be influenced both by spatial factors (including the diffusion of innovations) and by essentially nonspatial factors (such as the availabilityof education for women and the percentage of adult women who are currently married). The nonspatial variables are available directly from censuses but the spatial component requires...

This paper has essentially a methodological purpose. In a first section, we shortly present demography and historical demography, the intimacy between those two disciplines and their common intellectual history, the crisis they experimented in the 1980s, and how the life course paradigm and methods have been implemented to face up the challenge of shifting “from structure to process, from macro...

This article analyses the recent period changes in fertility in industrialized countries from the point of view of the varying degrees of fertility postponement at younger ages and subsequent partial recuperation at later ages. It does so through both period and cohort indicators. The outcome is that current period total fertility rates (PTFRs) are largely diverging because of differential recu...

This is a study of how the synergisms between cultural and structural factors, which played a major role during the historical fertility and nuptiality transition (first demographic transition or FDT), have continued to condition demographic innovations connected to the “second demographic transition” (SDT). The continuity or discontinuity from the “first” to the “second” demographic transition...

The aim of this paper is to review the performance of the family planning program initiated in 1989 in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Following a quick look at the family planning program that existed before the Revolution (1967-1979), the paper documents the fate of the program during the first decade after the Islamic Revolution (1979-1988) and its official revival in 1989. It is shown that th...