Understanding the relationship between economic and fertility trends is a challenge for demographic research. Karaman Örsal and Goldstein (2018) took a large group of middle-high income countries and looked at the relevant data from the postwar period onwards. They showed that, since 1970, good economic conditions have led to higher fertility, while bad economic conditions mean lower fertility, suggesting a pro-cyclical trend (see also Myrskylä et al. 2009). However, a close look at the demographic trends at the beginning of the twenty-first century casts doubts on this kind of interpretation. Economic indicators suggest that European countries are currently moving out of the Great Recession, whereas fertility trends are not so positive. For instance, in 2009 Northern European economies resumed economic growth, but their total fertility started to decrease substantially. In Norway, total fertility dropped from 1.98 in 2009 to 1.6 in 2018, the lowest ever in peacetime; similar changes, and even lower fertility levels, have been observed in Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Sweden (Comolli et al. 2019). On the other side of Europe, Mediterranean countries such as Italy, Greece and Spain, after a period of fertility rebound, re-entered, in the same period, a regime of lowest-low fertility, with total fertility around 1.3.