Population Studies-A Journal of Demography最新文献

In examining Italy's low fertility, recent studies have emphasized the role played by socio-economic factors, uncertainty, and the welfare state. Meanwhile, emerging research is highlighting a potential downward revision of fertility ideals among more recent generations. Our study analyses trends in fertility desires and expectations among young adults in Italy from 2012 to 2022. Findings reveal growing tendencies to: (1) not desire children, among more recent cohorts; and (2) to not expect to have children during the lifetime, in more recent years. Specifically, this indicates a nuanced demographic gradient: we observe a decline in fertility desires and expectations with age and a significant increase in the likelihood of not desiring children for women across birth cohorts. Our study highlights the need for robust, harmonized cross-national surveys to better understand new fertility ideals across different socio-demographic contexts.

Research indicates a significant slowdown in life expectancy growth in the United States (US) post 2010, marking a departure from the consistent progress in longevity throughout the twentieth century. We extend this understanding, tracing the deceleration of US life expectancy back to the 1950s, after which average decadal change dropped from 3.80 to 1.61 years. Surprisingly, these mid-twentieth-century shifts were consistent across race and sex in the US and also in other high-income countries. Using a simple approach of quantifying potential life expectancy gains by eliminating mortality at specific ages, we find that the potential gains in life expectancy from reducing midlife mortality have been larger in the US than in other countries since 1900. The findings suggest that US life expectancy is unlikely to progress at the high speed observed between 1900 and the 1950s, with future advancements hinging on the reduction of old-age mortality, particularly from cardiovascular diseases and mental and nervous system diseases.

Health is rarely used as an explanatory variable in fertility studies in high-income contexts, unlike in low-income settings. Using the 1958 National Child Development Study, we explore how self-rated health (SRH) and body mass index (BMI) at age 23 relate to achievement of fertility goals by age 46. We find that worse SRH and a BMI outside the healthy range at age 23 are strongly associated with lower fertility and underachieving fertility goals. While poor SRH is associated with lower fertility mostly among men, BMI outside the healthy range at 23 is more significant for women. Additional analyses indicate that employment and union history partly mediate the effect of health on fertility, but health retains a substantive direct effect. Our findings suggest that health in early adulthood is an important determinant, whether direct or indirect, of family life-course trajectories. This paper endorses the inclusion of health as an explanatory variable in studies of fertility in high-income contexts.

Men's childlessness is increasing in many high-income countries. In Finland, 29 per cent of all men aged 45 were childless in 2022. The cause of these high levels of childlessness is unclear. In this paper, we use rich Finnish population register data to examine whether sex imbalances in regional partner markets are a potential driver of men's childlessness. Partner markets are imbalanced in a given region if there is a surplus of men relative to women or vice versa. The data generally show an increasingly imbalanced partner market situation for men over time but with considerable regional heterogeneity. Individual-level regression results for men born in 1968-75 (N  =  194,080) indicate an increased probability of childlessness at age 45 after extended exposure to imbalanced partner markets over the life course. This association is particularly strong for low-income men. These findings are robust across indicators and specifications. Overall, regional context seems to play a crucial role in the risk of childlessness.

Demographers use ratios, proportions, and rates-all calculated as counts in numerators divided by counts in denominators-as key research inputs. For age-specific death rates, the numerator is observed deaths and the denominator is person-years lived. Life expectancy summarizes those rates into one measure, and its changes convey messages of changing mortality across time. We examine the contributions from the two components of life expectancy change: the population growth rate (relative changes in person-years in the denominator) and growth rate of deaths (relative changes in number of deaths in the numerator). We name this the numerator-denominator decomposition method. Applying the method to high-longevity countries during 2009-19 shows increases in life expectancy driven by high population growth at older ages without comparable increases in deaths. The United States experienced little life expectancy increase, and subnational comparisons show stark differences between urban and rural areas.

Despite a large literature on education and fertility, most studies are narrowly focused on the level of schooling completed. Does the schooling-fertility relationship depend on the quality of education? Is more schooling still associated with lower fertility even when the quality of education is poor? Drawing on Demographic and Health Survey data from 42 countries in Africa and Asia, this study uses cross-national analysis to examine whether the quality of education moderates the schooling-fertility relationship. Findings show that the strength of the schooling-fertility relationship depends significantly on a country's quality of education: the higher the quality of education, the stronger the negative relationship. But even when educational quality is low, a negative relationship between level of schooling and fertility still exists. By conceptually and empirically distinguishing the level of schooling from the quality of education, this study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of women's education and fertility.

This study examines the impact of China's regional pilot programmes, which aimed to reduce the sex ratio at birth (SRB) by prohibiting prenatal sex selection. These programmes, implemented in six provinces between 1996 and 2001, served as a precursor to the nationwide policy introduced in 2003. Using a staggered difference-in-differences approach and microdata from the 2010 Population Census, we estimate the causal effects of these pilot programmes on the SRB. The results indicate a significant decline in SRB for second and higher-order births but no meaningful change for first births, suggesting a relatively modest overall impact. The policy was more effective among populations with better economic conditions and higher maternal education and among non-agricultural hukou holders and migrants. This heterogeneity underscores the importance of socio-economic factors, gender-egalitarian attitudes, and strength of policy enforcement in determining the policy's success. These findings provide valuable insights into the potential effects of the 2003 nationwide policy.

Insecurities and risks related to ageing in a foreign country could fuel return migration among international retirement migrants. The few studies examining retirement migrants' return have been small in scale and focused mainly on return intentions rather than return behaviour. In this paper, we examine the prevalence and predictors of return migration among retirement migrants and the discrepancy between return intentions and return behaviour. We collected survey data on a representative sample of 5,065 Dutch retirement migrants in 40 destinations and combined them with administrative data on return migration. Three years after data collection, almost 9 per cent had returned to the Netherlands, whereas less than 5 per cent had intended to return during this period. Our findings show how age-related changes and transnational ties to the country of origin increase the likelihood of return. Our results also suggest that retirement migrants may underestimate the long-term implications and social embeddedness of the return migration decision.

In the UK, cohabitation has become the normative type of first co-residential partnership. While some couples go on to marry, others increasingly continue to cohabit or break up. One possible explanation is the rise in young people's economic precariousness. However, few studies have analysed this hypothesis empirically for the UK. By analysing data on cohabiting couple dyads from 1991 to 2019, we explore how economic precariousness (measured by four traits: employment, labour income, savings, and financial perceptions) relates to marriage and to cohabitation dissolution. The types of precarious traits seen in couples, alongside their distribution between partners, are crucial for understanding socio-economic differences in cohabitation outcomes. Marriage is less likely among couples where the man is jobless or has no savings, suggesting that marriage is a financially committed relationship, more reliant on men's resources. Couples where women hold worse financial perceptions than men are most likely to separate, highlighting the importance of subjective measures.

In countries without adequate death registration systems, adult mortality is often estimated using orphanhood-based methods. The HIV pandemic breaches several assumptions of these methods, for example, by increasing the correlation between maternal and child survival. Using microsimulations we generated 1,152 populations facing HIV epidemics and evaluated different orphanhood-based estimates against the underlying mortality rates. We regressed survivorship probabilities on proportions of respondents with surviving mothers, adjusting for trends in seroprevalence and coverage of antiretroviral therapy, to obtain new coefficients. We tested the different methods on survey and census data from 16 African countries with high HIV prevalence. We found that the original orphanhood method underestimates mortality during an AIDS epidemic, but better estimates can be obtained using new coefficients applied to synthetic measures of maternal survival. The resulting estimates agree well with those of the United Nations Population Division. Orphanhood-based estimates can fill data gaps in adult mortality, including in countries with high HIV prevalence.