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AbstractScientific ideas on the human population tend to be rooted in a "slow demography" paradigm, which emphasizes an inertial, predictable, self‐contained view of population dynamics, mostly dependent on fertility and mortality. Yet, demography can also move fast. At the country level, it is crucial to empirically assess how fast demography moves by taking migratory movements into account, in addition to fertility and mortality. We discuss these ideas and present new estimates of the speed of population change, that is, country‐level population turnover rates, as well as the share of turnover due to migration, for all countries in the world with available data between 1990 and 2020. Population turnover is inversely related to population size and development, and migratory movements tend to become important factors in shaping demography for both small and highly developed countries. Longitudinally, we analyze annual turnover data for Italy and Germany, documenting the changing speed of population change over time and its determinants. Accepting the "fast and slow" demography perspective has several implications for science and policy, which we discuss.

This paper documents the fundamental changes in family formation that took place in Europe during the last two decades of the twentieth century, as well as some possible explanations for these changes. First, European youth have postponed key demographic events, and the latest-late pattern of transition to adulthood emerged in the South. Second, lowest-low fertility emerged during the 1990s in the same area, spreading quickly to Central and Eastern Europe. Policies and economic trends, long-standing cultural factors and ideational change interact in shaping change and differences. Macro-level factors in turn interact with micro-level ones to shape outcomes. The new demographic regime of Europe is thus likely to persist.

AbstractItaly is a case study in lowest‐low fertility. Its internal heterogeneity is substantial and changing over time. The paper has two main aims. First, it aims at investigating whether the theoretical framework offered by the diffusionist perspective to fertility transition could still be relevant in explaining fertility changes in contemporary advanced societies. Second, the paper aims at investigating if and how the associations between fertility and a series of indicators of secularisation, female occupation, contribution of fertility of immigrants, and economic development change across space and over time. We make use of geographically weighted regressions and spatial panel regressions to model explicitly spatial dependence in fertility among Italian provinces over the period between 1999 and 2010. Results show that spatial dependence in provincial fertility persists even after controlling for standard correlates of fertility, consistently with a diffusionist perspective. Further, the local association between fertility and its correlates is not homogeneous across provinces. The strength and in some cases also the direction of such associations vary spatially, suggesting that the determinants of low fertility change across space. Finally, the associations between fertility and its correlates change over time. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.