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This article contributes to the geographic analysis of fertility decline in the demographic transition in Europe. We reanalyze Galloway, Hammel, and Lee's (1994) Prussian data with spatial analysis methods. Our multivariate analysis provides evidence of the predictive effect of both economic and cultural variables. Furthermore, even after all of the observable economic, social, and cultural variables have been controlled for, our findings show that a significant unexplained geographic clustering of fertility decline remains. We then specify spatial econometric models, which show that in addition to economic and cultural factors, socio‐geographic factors such as being adjacent to areas of sharp fertility decline are also needed to understand the pattern of fertility decline. These results provide new support for the role of social diffusion in the process, while allowing for the direct structural effects of economic change.

Some 20 years after reunification, the contrast between East and West Germany offers a natural experiment for studying the degree of persistence of Communist‐era family patterns, the effects of economic change, and fertility postponement. After reunification, period fertility rates plummeted in the former East Germany to record low levels. Since the mid‐1990s, however, period fertility rates have been rising in East Germany, in contrast to the nearly constant rates seen in the West. By 2008, the TFR of East Germany had overtaken that of the West. We explore why fertility in East Germany is higher than in West Germany, despite unfavorable economic circumstances in the East. We address this and related questions by (a) presenting an account of the persisting East/West differences in attitudes toward and constraints on childbearing, (b) conducting an order‐specific fertility analysis of recent fertility trends, and (c) projecting completed fertility for the recent East and west German cohorts. In addition to using the Human Fertility Database, perinatal statistics allow us to calculate a tempo‐corrected TFR for East and West Germany.

Recent developments in mathematical demography offer a new, simple means of producing long‐range population projections. The well‐known extant such projections, produced by the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, rely on elaborate cohort‐component projection methods that require a large number of detailed assumptions and are difficult to replicate. Building upon recent results in the formal demography of nonstable populations, the authors show that analytic methods produce estimates of future population size very similar to those obtained through traditional methods. Simplicity is a virtue in making projections, allowing sensitivity tests of assumptions and avoiding the misleading impression of precision associated with more complicated methods. Cohort‐component methods should still be used for short‐ and medium‐term forecasts and projections. For the long term, however, analytic methods should supplement or even replace traditional projections.

Enthusiasm about the prospect of large increases in human life expectancy is often dampened by fears that lower mortality will increase population size, hence population pressure. A simple mathematical model of life‐cycle stretching demonstrates that if increased longevity is accompanied by later childbearing, a trend that is already underway, future declines in mortality will not increase population size.

AbstractBehind the steady march of progress toward longer life expectancy in many low‐mortality countries, there have been setbacks even before the Covid‐19 pandemic. In this paper, we use an exploratory approach to describe the temporal structure, age patterns, and geographic aspects of life expectancy reversals. We find that drops in life expectancy are often followed by larger than average improvements, which tells us that most reversals are transitory with little long‐term influence. The age structure of mortality decline when life expectancy falls is tilted toward older ages, a pattern that is quite different from the general pattern of mortality improvement. Geographic analysis shows that mortality reversals are correlated across neighboring countries like Italy and France, or Canada and the United States. These findings are consistent with contagious disease and weather being important causes of life expectancy reversals. We conclude with a discussion of implications for formal modeling and forecasting of mortality to accommodate these patterns that violate some standard assumptions.

In 1997, the US Office of Management & Budget (OMB) issued revised standards that allowed respondents to select more than one category ("box") for racial identification on federal forms; this change first appeared on the national decennial census in 2000. Shortly before the Census was conducted, new OMB guidelines dictated that respondents marking "white" & any other nonwhite race should be counted as members of the nonwhite group. Explored here are some implications of these new allocation rules (Bulletin 00-02) concerning the use of multirace data, particularly for civil rights & voting rights laws based on single-race criteria. It is argued that the OMB standards effectively reimplement the old "one-drop rule" used to classify anyone with any degree of African ancestry as black during the 19th century. In addition, it is contended that these standards (1) violate the principle of self-identification, & (2) err on the side of extending race-based public policies to individuals who might previously not have qualified, making such policies even more controversial. The OMB guidelines are outlined & some simulated estimates are offered on how their reallocation measures will impact the national racial composition -- & policies based on it. 3 Tables, 2 Figures, 17 References. K. Hyatt Stewart

This paper presents national estimates of the population likely to identify with more than one race in the 2000 census as a result of a new federal policy allowing multiple racial identification. A large number of race-based public policies—including affirmative action and the redistricting provisions of the Voting Rights Act—may be affected by the shift of some 8–18 million people out of traditional single-race statistical groups. The declines in single-race populations resulting from the new classification procedure are likely to be greater in magnitude than the net undercount in the U.S. census at the center of the controversy over using census sampling. Based on ancestry data in the 1990 census and experimental survey results from the 1995 Current Population Survey, we estimate that 3.1–6.6% of the U.S. population is likely to mark multiple races. Our results are substantially higher than those suggested by previous research and have implications for the coding, reporting, and use of multiple response racial data by government and researchers. The change in racial classification may pose new conundrums for the implementation of race-based public policies, which have faced increasing criticism in recent years.

Total fertility rates fell to previously unseen levels in a large number of countries beginning in the early 1990s. The persistence of TFRs below 1.3 raised the possibility of rapid population aging and decline. We discuss the recent widespread turnaround in so‐called lowest‐low‐fertility countries in Europe and East Asia. The number of countries with TFRs below 1.3 fell from 21 in 2003 to five in 2008. Moreover, the upturn in the TFR was not confined to lowest‐fertility countries, but affected the whole developed world. We explore the demographic explanations for the recent rise in TFRs stemming from fertility timing effects as well as economic, policy, and social factors. Although the current economic downturn may suppress TFRs in the short run, we conclude that formerly lowest‐low‐fertility countries will continue to see increases in fertility as the transitory effects of shifts to later childbearing become less important.

Population aging and longevity can pose challenges to the sustainability of fiscal budgets. This is of particular concern in Europe's rapidly aging welfare states offering generous social support programs for the elderly. Still, there are differences in the pace of ageing and the generosity of welfare states. We use public tax and benefit age schedules from the National Transfer Accounts project to estimate the impact of population aging on fiscal budgets of single countries and their implications for potential transfer flows in between European Union countries. We show the positive impact of changes in the economic life cycle by working longer and the impact of migration on the redistribution of transfers across Europe. We illustrate the crucial role that demography plays in deepening and reinforcing the fortunes of European finances.

Résumé L'Allemagne du xix e siècle est un laboratoire particulièrement intéressant pour l'étude des différences démographiques entre régions, et pourtant les structures de la famille à cette époque dans cette partie de l'Europe restent peu explorées. Cet article analyse la variabilité des situations domestiques avec une mesure agrégée de la complexité des ménages fondée sur les statistiques publiées du recensement allemand de 1885. Des méthodes descriptives et des techniques de modélisation spatiale permettent d'examiner les hypothèses existantes sur les déterminants de la complexité des ménages. Les variations régionales de la structure des ménages sont-elles associées aux variations concernant l'emploi agricole, les pratiques d'héritage, l'appartenance ethnique et d'autres caractéristiques socio-économiques ? Les régions où la complexité des ménages était faible se concentrent dans le sud-ouest et le sud de l'Allemagne, et celles où la complexité était forte dans le nord et le nord-est. Quant aux différences macro-régionales socio-économiques et culturelles, dont on sait qu'elles existaient en Allemagne à la fin du xix e siècle et qu'on pensait décisives, elles ne s'avèrent que faiblement associées aux schémas spatiaux de complexité des ménages. Ces résultats sont cohérents avec l'hypothèse de Ruggles (2009), selon laquelle les variations spatiales des structures de ménage sont essentiellement liées au degré d'emploi dans l'agriculture et aux caractéristiques démographiques.

With period fertility having risen in many low‐fertility countries, an important emerging question is whether cohort fertility trends are also reversing. We produce new estimates of cohort fertility for 37 developed countries using a new, simple method that avoids the underestimation typical of previous approaches. Consistent with the idea that timing changes were largely responsible for the last decades' low period fertility, we find that family size has remained considerably higher than the period rates of 1.5 in many "low‐fertility" countries, averaging about 1.8 children. Our forecasts suggest that the long‐term decline in cohort fertility is flattening or reversing in many world regions previously characterized by low fertility. We document the marked increase of cohort fertility in the English‐speaking world and in Scandinavia; signs of an upward reversal in many low‐fertility countries, including Japan and Germany; and continued declines in countries such as Taiwan and Portugal. We include in our forecasts estimates of statistical uncertainty and the possible effects of the recent economic recession.

In diesem Artikel werden die offiziellen Fertilitätsprognosen der Statistischen Ämter
in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz untersucht. Zunächst betrachten wir für
alle drei Länder die historische Entwicklung der Fertilitätsprognosen. Es zeigt sich,
dass in allen drei Ländern die Fertilitätsprognosen auf einer Fortschreibung der aktuellen
Fertilitätsentwicklungen in die Zukunft beruhen. Im Anschluss untersuchen wir detailliert
die aktuellen Prognosen – mit besonderer Berücksichtigung ihrer Beschaffenheit im
Hinblick auf die Veränderungen im Timing und Quantum der Fertilität. Wir zeigen, dass
die Annahmen zum erwarteten Ende des Anstiegs des durchschnittlichen Gebäralters im
Prognosezeitraum einen Rückgang im Quantum der Fertilität implizieren. Dies ist insbesondere
vor dem Hintergrund niedriger Geburtenziffern, wie sie in den drei betrachteten Ländern
vorherrschen, von Relevanz. Analoge Schlussfolgerungen zeigen sich, wenn wir von einer
Kohortenperspektive ausgehen. Basierend auf diesen Ergebnissen, schlagen wir vor,
explizit die Verschiebung des durchschnittlichen Gebäralters und deren Auswirkung
auf die Fertilitätsniveaus zu berücksichtigen. Dies könnte mittels des Bongaarts-Feeney-Ansatzes
zur Tempokorrektur oder auf Grundlage eines ähnlichen Tempoansatzes geschehen. Zudem
zeigen wir drei konsistente Varianten (niedrig, mittel und hoch) am Beispiel von Deutschland
und weisen nach, dass eine entsprechende Berechnungen unter Berücksichtigung des Tempoansatzes
in den meisten Fällen die mittlere Variante der Prognose, die von einem konstanten
Niveau der Fertilität ausgeht, übertreffen kann.