Beyond the Economic Gaze: Childbearing During and After Recessions in the Nordic Countries

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.

Ideological Dilemmas Actualised by the Idea of Living Environmentally Childfree

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Psychiatric consequences of a father’s leave policy by nativity: a quasi-experimental study in Sweden

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Three Decades of Lowest-low Fertility in Spain, 1991 – 2018

“…After ten years of continued fertility declines, countries such as Sweden, Finland and Norway experienced a fertility rebound that fueled, among others, the gender revolution theory (Goldscheider, et al, 2015). However, recent studies show that fertility has fallen again in these countries (Jalovaara, et al, 2019;Comolli, et al 2020). Due to poor evidence of an eventual fertility recovery, and the impact of the great economic recession of 2008, now aggravated by the Covid-19 crisis, material explanations have again gained strength (Seltzer, 2019;Matysiak, et al, 2020).…”