Abstract
It is widely acknowledged that European countries differ strongly in the conditions offered to working parents to combine paid employment and childcare. Our analysis conducted in Chapter 4 demonstrates that in the second half of the 2000s these conditions were undoubtedly best in Scandinavian countries, followed by the Netherlands, Finland, Belgium, the United Kingdom, and France. In such countries as Ireland, Austria, Luxembourg, Estonia, Germany, and Latvia the incompatibilities between women’s employment and childrearing imposed by the macro-context were already stronger. The institutional, structural and cultural environment was found to be least favourable to work and family reconciliation in Southern European countries and remaining former socialist countries, such as Hungary, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Slovakia and Poland. Among them, Poland and Greece displayed extraordinarily high incompatibilities between work and care. Europe is also strongly divided as regards the level of living standards which are better in the West than in the East in the objective as well as subjective terms.
This chapter is a modified version of the article prepared together with Daniele Vignoli: Matysiak, A., & Vignoli, D. (2008). Fertility and women’s employment: A meta-analysis. European Journal of Population, 24(4), 363–384.
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Notes
- 1.
FFS in the majority of the CEE countries was conducted in the first half of the 1990s.
- 2.
The work was conducted when Anna Matysiak and Daniele Vignoli were resident PhD students at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. Together they carried out the literature search, constructed the meta-sample, built the meta-database, and ran the analyses. Matysiak was in charge of the effects of young children on mothers’ employment, Vignoli the effects of women’s employment on fertility.
- 3.
Current Contents and EconLit, provided by the Ovid service, give access to complete bibliographic information and table of contents of over 7,600 of the world’s leading scholarly journals and to more than 2,000 book series covering all disciplines. They cover items published since 1990.
- 4.
Researchers mainly used partner’s labour market status or partner’s education as a proxy for partner’s earnings. Only six papers directly used the variable ‘partner’s income’, and only three controlled for household income.
- 5.
Non-employment is defined as unemployment as well as inactivity.
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Matysiak, A. (2011). Macro-context and the Cross-Country Variation in the Micro-level Relationship Between Fertility and Women’s Employment. In: Interdependencies Between Fertility and Women's Labour Supply. European Studies of Population, vol 17. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1284-3_5
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