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Structural change and childlessness in Southern and Eastern Europe: The role of women’s education and celibacy

Annalisa Donno, University of Padova
Maria Letizia Tanturri, University of Padova

Permanent childlessness shows similar trends across European countries: a peak for the 1880-1910 birth cohorts, a continuous drop across the 1910-45 ones, and a steady rise across those born after the war. In spite of these commonalities, regional differences persist: Eastern European countries show the lowest prevalence of childlessness and the slowest growth rates, while in Central and Southern Europe the increase for the youngest generations is remarkable. This paper focuses on women born between 1930s and 1960s to study the changes occurred in childlessness prevalence in Austria, Italy and Greece for Central-Southern Europe, and in Romania and Hungary for Eastern Europe. The aim is to disentangle between the increase of childlessness caused by structural changes and by variations in the propensity towards childbearing. Fairlie’s decomposition technique has been applied to IPUMS census data and for Italy to Family and Social Subjects surveys, in both cross-cohorts and cross-country perspectives. Preliminary results evidence that the increase of childlessness is driven mainly by the spread of permanent celibacy among women, and less by the increased education level, with the exception of Hungary. Only for the youngest cohorts, propensity for childless fuels the increase of the phenomenon, but not yet in Eastern Countries.

Keywords: Fertility and childbirth, Census data, Cross-country comparative analyses, Decomposition analysis/methods

No extended abstract or paper available

  Presented in Session 85. European Fertility: Recent findings