Italy is a case study in lowest-low fertility. Its internal heterogeneity is substantial and changes over time. Historically, the South had higher fertility, but in recent years it the North has become the area with the highest fertility. This paper adopts a diffusionist perspective to fertility to study the current temporal and spatial trends in Italian provincial fertility, considering indicators of secularization, female employment, migrant fertility and economic development. We make use of geographically weighted regressions and spatial panel regressions from spatial econometrics to model explicitly spatial dependence in fertility among Italian provinces over the period between 1999 and 2010. Results show that spatial dependence in provincial fertility persists even after controlling for standard correlates of fertility, consistently with a diffusionist perspective. Further, we find that the local association between fertility and its correlates is not homogeneous across provinces. The strength and in some cases also the direction of such associations vary spatially.
International audienceThe discussion on the causes of the most recent fertility decline in Europe, and in particular on the emergence of lowest-low fertility, emphasizes the relevance of cultural factors in addition to economic ones. As part of such a cultural framework, the heterogeneity of preferences concerning the “career vs. family” dichotomy has been systematized in the “Preference Theory” approach developed by Catherine Hakim. This heterogeneity in preferences, however, has so far been underinvestigated in a comparative framework. This paper makes use of comparative data from the 2004/2005 Round of the European Social Survey to test the links between individual-level preferences and both fertility outcomes and fertility intentions, in a variety of societal settings. Results confirm an association between work–family lifestyle preferences and realized fertility in a variety of European countries, while they do not show a relationship between lifestyle preferences and fertility intentions. Results further support the existence of heterogeneous patterns of association between lifestyle preferences and fertility choices among welfare regimes
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.