Beyond the Economic Gaze: Childbearing During and After Recessions in the Nordic Countries
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Beyond the Economic Gaze: Childbearing During and After Recessions in the Nordic Countries C. L. Comolli1 · G. Neyer2 · G. Andersson2 · L. Dommermuth3 · P. Fallesen2,4 · M. Jalovaara5 · A. Klængur Jónsson2 · M. Kolk2 · T. Lappegård3 Received: 5 December 2019 / Accepted: 17 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract During the 2010s, fertility rates fell across the Nordic region. The onset of these declines seems linked to the Great Recession of 2008–2009, but their continuation cannot easily be linked to subsequent economic change. The 1990s, too, brought episodes of economic crises to the Nordic region that were followed by different degrees of fertility decline. In this study, we provide an empirical overview of parity-, age- and education-specific fertility developments in the five Nordic countries in the wake of the economic recessions in 2008 and the early 1990s, respectively. We demonstrate a high degree of heterogeneity in fertility developments across countries after 1990, whereas after 2008, the trends are much more similar across the five countries. Likewise, the educational differences in birth hazards that characterized the developments after 1990 were much smaller in the initial years after 2008–2009. This reversal from heterogeneity to homogeneity in the fertility response to recessions calls for an expansion of theories on the cyclicality of fertility in relation to uncertainty and economic and social change. In our discussion, we consider the role of a set of factors that also incorporates the state, crisis management, and perceptions of economic and welfare uncertainty. Keywords Fertility · Childbearing · Recession · Economic uncertainty · Welfare uncertainty · Nordic countries
* C. L. Comolli [email protected] 1
University of Lausanne, Quartier UNIL-Mouline, Bâtiment Géopolis, Bureau : 5321, CH‑1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
2
Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
3
University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
4
ROCKWOOL Foundation, Copenhagen, Denmark
5
University of Turku, Turku, Finland
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C. L. Comolli et al.
1 Introduction The Nordic countries—Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden—are widely recognized for having generous family policies, protective and employment-oriented welfare systems, high rates of labor-force participation among both men and women, and, until very recently, comparatively high fertility levels. After the large decline in fertility across Western countries in the 1970s, total fertility rates (TFRs) in the Nordic countries remained in the range between 1.7 and 2.3 children per woman for several decades (1980–2010). Only in Denmark and Sweden did it temporarily fall to 1.4 and 1.5 children per woman in the mid1980s (Denmark) and mid-1990s (Sweden), respectively. During the same period, most other countries in Europe consistently registered fertility rates below 1.7, and many Southern and Eastern European countries even experienced lowestlow fertility rates below 1.3 children per woman (Kohler et al. 2002). Scholars have tended to at
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