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The fertility transition around the world

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Abstract

In this paper, we study the evolution of the distribution of fertility rates across the world from 1950 to 2005 using parametric mixture models. We demonstrate the existence of twin peaks and the division of the world’s countries in two distinct components: a high-fertility regime and a low-fertility regime. Whereas the significance of twin peaks vanishes over time, the two fertility regimes continue to exists over the whole observation period. In 1950, about two thirds of the world’s countries belonged to the high-fertility regime and the rest constituted the low-fertility regime. By the year 2005, this picture has reversed. Within both the low- and the high-fertility regime, the average fertility rate declined, with a larger absolute decline within the high-fertility regime. Visually, the two peaks moved closer together. For the low-fertility regime, we find both β- and σ -convergence but we cannot establish any convergence pattern for the high-fertility regime. Our results support the idea of conditional convergence where the condition is the successful initiation of the fertility transition. The results are less supportive of the existence of a unique high-fertility equilibrium.

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Notes

  1. The notion of a fertility trap originates from Malthus (1798). The study of Nelson (1956) is a first modern formulation of the idea as a locally stable equilibrium. See also, among others, Kögel and Prskawetz (2001) and Strulik (2004). The unified growth literature, in contrast, interprets the Malthusian era as one of glacier-slow development rather than one of stagnation at a locally stable fertility trap (see Galor (2005)).

  2. The twin peak debate originated from Quah (1993, 1996), see also Jones (1997), Kremer et al. (2001), and Feyrer (2008).

  3. For each time period we observe only a few countries displaying a posterior probability in the vicinity of 0.5, indicating that the transition from the high-fertility regime to the low-fertility regime happen rather quickly such that the countries in transition do not form their own regime.

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Acknowledgment

We would like to thank David Bloom, Carl-Johan Dalgaard, and Oded Galor for comments and Florian Ketterer for providing the EM algorithm.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, University of Göttingen, Platz der Göttinger Sieben 3, 37073, Göttingen, Germany

    Holger Strulik & Sebastian Vollmer

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  1. Holger Strulik
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  2. Sebastian Vollmer
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Correspondence to Holger Strulik.

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Responsibility editor: Alessandro Cigno

Appendix

Appendix

Fig. 4
figure 4

Cross-country distribution of fertility rates: 1955–1955 to 1995–2000. Fitted mixture model (solid line), weighted components (dotted lines), and kernel density estimator (dashed line). The rugs below the plots represent the observed fertility rates

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Strulik, H., Vollmer, S. The fertility transition around the world. J Popul Econ 28, 31–44 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-013-0496-2

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