Volume 33 - Article 20 | Pages 561–588  

Lifetime reproduction and the second demographic transition: Stochasticity and individual variation

By Silke van Daalen, Hal Caswell

Abstract

Background: In the last half of the previous century many developed countries went through a period of decreasing fertility rates, referred to as the second demographic transition. This transition is often measured using the Total Fertility Rate (TFR), which gives the mean number of children produced by a woman surviving through her reproductive years. The TFR ignores effects of mortality and, as a mean, provides no information on variability among individuals in lifetime reproduction.

Objective: Our goal is to quantify the statistics (mean, variance, standard deviation, coefficient of variation, and skewness) during the second demographic transition. We compare these statistical properties as functions of age, time, and developmental indices.

Methods: We used Markov chains with rewards to compute the moments of lifetime reproductive output (LRO) based on age-specific mortality and fertility rates for 40 developed countries, two hunter-gatherer populations and a group of North-American Hutterites. The analysis uses a Markov chain to model individual survival, and treats reproduction as a Bernoulli-distributed reward with probability equal to the age-specific fertility.

Results: All statistical properties of lifetime reproduction changed during the transition. The mean and standard deviation of LRO declined, and the coefficient of variation and skewness increased. By 2000, these statistics were tightly correlated across countries, suggesting that the entire distribution of LRO shifted, not just the mean.

Conclusions: We find that developed countries adhere to a seemingly universal distribution in LRO, during and after the second demographic transition. This distribution becomes more apparent when development improves health circumstances and decreases mortality.

Author’s Affiliation

• Silke van Daalen - Universiteit van Amsterdam, the Netherlands EMAIL
• Hal Caswell - Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, United States of America EMAIL

Other articles by the same author/authors in Demographic Research

Healthy longevity from incidence-based models: More kinds of health than stars in the sky
Volume 45 - Article 13

The formal demography of kinship VII: Lifetime kin overlap within and across generations
Volume 53 - Article 5

The formal demography of kinship VI: Demographic stochasticity and variance in the kinship network
Volume 51 - Article 39

The formal demography of kinship V: Kin loss, bereavement, and causes of death
Volume 49 - Article 41

The contributions of stochastic demography and social inequality to lifespan variability
Volume 49 - Article 13

How does the demographic transition affect kinship networks?
Volume 48 - Article 32

The formal demography of kinship IV: Two-sex models and their approximations
Volume 47 - Article 13

The formal demography of kinship III: Kinship dynamics with time-varying demographic rates
Volume 45 - Article 16

The formal demography of kinship II: Multistate models, parity, and sibship
Volume 42 - Article 38

The formal demography of kinship: A matrix formulation
Volume 41 - Article 24

The sensitivity analysis of population projections
Volume 33 - Article 28

Demography and the statistics of lifetime economic transfers under individual stochasticity
Volume 32 - Article 19

A matrix approach to the statistics of longevity in heterogeneous frailty models
Volume 31 - Article 19

Why do lifespan variability trends for the young and old diverge? A perturbation analysis
Volume 30 - Article 48

Reproductive value, the stable stage distribution, and the sensitivity of the population growth rate to changes in vital rates
Volume 23 - Article 19

Perturbation analysis of nonlinear matrix population models
Volume 18 - Article 3

Most recent similar articles in Demographic Research

Early unintended childbearing and unsecured debt in the United States
Volume 53 - Article 27    | Keywords: demography, fertility, gender, life course, mothers

Neighbors’ social attitudes predict variations in live births among the Amish of Holmes County, Ohio, United States
Volume 53 - Article 25    | Keywords: Amish, diffusion, fertility, household, proximity, religion, spatial analysis

Analysing migrant fertility using machine learning techniques: An application of random survival forest to longitudinal data from France
Volume 53 - Article 21    | Keywords: fertility, immigrants, machine learning, random survival forest, survival analysis

The partnership, fertility, and employment trajectories of immigrants in the United Kingdom: An intersectional life course approach using three-channel sequence analysis
Volume 53 - Article 10    | Keywords: employment, fertility, immigrants, multi-channel sequence analysis, partnership, United Kingdom

Where do we go from here? Partnership-parenthood trajectories of cohabitation as first union during young adulthood in the United States
Volume 53 - Article 9    | Keywords: cohabitation, family inequality, fertility, marriage, race/ethnicity, transition to adulthood, union formation, United States of America