On the drivers of the fertility rebound
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On the drivers of the fertility rebound Georgios Mavropoulos1 · Theodore Panagiotidis1 Received: 23 September 2019 / Accepted: 27 August 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This paper investigates empirically the fertility rebound in low- and high-income OECD countries for the period 1970 to 2016. The focus is on the turning points of the rebound for the two country groups. We estimate the turning points in terms of GDP per capita, labour productivity, and female labour force participation. Results suggest that the rebound, (1) is statistically significant for low- and high-income OECD countries in terms of GDP per capita and labour productivity, (2) is present for female labour force participation mostly for the higher income country group and, (3) differences in the turning points are minimized for the two country groups when labour productivity is considered. Labour productivity emerges as the most important economic driver for the fertility rebound. Keywords Fertility rebound · Economic development · Labour productivity JEL Classification J11 · J13 · J21
1 Introduction In late 90’s–early 00’s, many developed countries experienced an increase in their total fertility rates (TFR) for the first time after decades of continuously drops. The first as well as the second demographic transition (SDT) (Lesthaeghe 2010) refer to a steady decline in fertility rates along with increases in human (economic) development. However, the well-established fact of a negative association between fertility and economic development (Kirk 1996; Doepke 2004) has been questioned. Myrskylä et al. (2009) employing cross section and longitudinal analyses show that higher levels of socio-economic development coincide with fertility increments. Hence, a new pattern arises which changes the relationship between development and fertility from negative to an inverse J-shaped.
* Theodore Panagiotidis [email protected] 1
Department of Economics, University of Macedonia, Thessaloníki, Greece
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Economic Change and Restructuring
Fig. 1 The fertility rebound in terms of HDI and GDP per capita. Period 1970–2016. OECD countries plus Brazil, China, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Russia Federation, and South Africa
Figure 1a depicts the rebound with respect to Human Development Index (HDI) (Myrskylä et al. 2009) and Fig. 2b with respect to GDP per capita (Luci-Greulich and Thévenon 2014, LGT hereafter). The former employed the Human Development Index (HDI) and were the first to indicate a threshold where the fertility starts to increase. The latter provided evidence on the rebound taking into account the economic component of HDI. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Sect. 2 presents the literature, and Sect. 3 investigates the potential relation of labour productivity and female labour force participation with respect to the rebound. Sect. 4 presents the data and the methodology, Sect. 5 refers to the empirical analysis, and Sect. 6 presents the results and the rob
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