The paper investigates the complex relationships between premarital fertility and HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan African countries. The DHS surveys provided data to compute the prevalence of premarital fertility, defined as any birth before the first marriage. The UNAIDS database provided data to compute the prevalence of HIV infection among pregnant women. Results indicate a moderate association betw...

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The public discourse about the ongoing fertility decline and spread of low fertility, consequences thereof, is often unscientific emotionally charged. As I argue in my book, Decline Prosper! (Skirbekk, 2022), per se does not pose a major societal threat – it also accompanied by number benefits. In this article, summarize main points: namely, that i) negative are exaggerated based on false assum...

I. Trends in Fertility During the 1950s, baby boom-fueled explosive population growth had been eating into the poor basis of economic growth, working as a major cause of the vicious cycle of poverty. Therefore, the Korean government adopted the anti-natal policy and initiated a strong family planning program in the early 1960s when Korea’s economic development began to step up. As the family pl...

Only a few rich nations are currently at replacement levels of fertility and many are considerably below. We believe that changes in the status of women are driving fertility change. At low levels of female status, women specialize in household production and fertility is high. In an intermediate phase, women have increasing opportunities to earn a living outside the home yet still shoulder the...

During the past 20 years fertility patterns within England and Wales have changed considerably. The total fertility rate experienced a prolonged decline during the 1990s and hit a record low in 2001. Since then the level of fertility has increased fairly rapidly. Over the two decades, fertility has been constantly increasing at ages above 30, and as a consequence the mean age of motherhood has ...

The present study investigated whether associations between individuals’ personality traits and whether they have children have been modified by birth-cohort effects in the 20th-century United States. Participants were from the Midlife Development in the United States study (n = 6,259) and the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (n = 3,994) and were born between 1914 and 1974. Data on personality trai...

Italy is a case study in lowest-low fertility. Its internal heterogeneity is substantial, and changing over time. While historically fertility was higher in the South, in recent years differentials have reversed. In this paper we adopt a macro-level perspective to investigate the convergence of regional fertility in Italy over the period 1952–2009. Then, we estimate a series of spatial panel re...

The United States has become increasingly characterized by stark class divides in family structure. Poor women are less likely to marry than their more affluent counterparts, but far more likely to have a birth outside of marriage. Recent theoretical and qualitative work at the intersection of demography and cultural sociology suggests that these patterns are generated because poor women have h...