Population Studies-A Journal of Demography最新文献

This is the first study in India to move beyond women's sexual and reproductive health, instead examining the consequences of having an unwanted birth on women's general health. We use nationally representative longitudinal data from the two waves of the India Human Development Survey (2005 and 2012) for 3,776 currently married, non-pregnant women aged 18-40 at baseline who were interviewed in both waves. Results from multivariate linear and logistic regression show that mothers having an unwanted birth between the two time periods were likely to report worse self-rated health in 2012 and more likely to experience a deterioration in health between the two waves compared with those who had a wanted birth, after accounting for other maternal and household characteristics. Results are robust to models accounting for propensity weighting.

Delayed childbearing in advanced economies has increased reliance on assisted reproductive technologies (ART). Yet, how ART and especially donor egg treatments contribute to population-level fertility rates remains under-studied. Analysing all ART treatments in the UK (1991-2018), we document rising ART usage: ART-conceived births contributed 3.0 per cent to the total fertility rate in 2018 and 14.9 per cent to fertility rates among women aged 45-50. ART success rates show a clear age-related decline when using women's own eggs but remain consistent across age groups when using donor eggs. Consequently, from age 43 onwards, ART-conceived births result predominantly from donor egg treatments. Our findings indicate that fertility recuperation at advanced ages is unlikely to succeed with ART using a patient's own eggs; egg donation and egg freezing appear indispensable for supporting fertility at advanced ages with ART. This has significant implications for public health communication, as this fact is not widely known.

The conventional framework of fertility research conceptualizes childbirth from the mother's perspective. From her perspective, birth is an uncertain and potentially recurring event. In contrast, the Born once, die once (B1D1) framework conceptualizes birth as an event experienced by the child. From that perspective, birth is certain and, like death, occurs only once. As an advantage over the conventional approach, the new perspective allows for the use of density, survival, and hazard functions to study age patterns of birth at the macro level, using birth counts for all parities by maternal age. Here, we reformulate the B1D1 framework using fertility-rate notation. This allows us to extend the conventional fertility framework by analogous density, survival, and hazard functions. These functions can shed new light on differences in age patterns of fertility across populations and advance conventional fertility research, including by capturing fertility and mortality age patterns with common concepts and measures.

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.

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.

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.