Abstract
The decline in fertility experienced by the industrialised economies over recent decades was for a long time attributed to the rising labour force participation of women. For instance, the authors of the concept of the second demographic transition ascribe the fall in the propensity to have children to the rising economic autonomy of women and their desire for self-fulfilment, among other things (Van de Kaa, 1988: 17; Lesthaeghe, 1992). The delegates at the UN Population Conference in Sofia in 1983 came to a similar conclusion (UN 1983 after Willekens, 1991).
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Notes
- 1.
This study was partly conducted under the Low Wage Employment Research Network (LoWER3), funded under the EU Sixth Framework Programme. The ELFS micro-data were available to the members of LoWER3 for the research conducted within the Network.
- 2.
While in all other countries the sampling units are households, in the Nordic countries the units are individuals. Denmark and Finland provide information on household composition additionally; no such information is available for Sweden and Norway.
- 3.
Individual LFS data for CEE countries are included in the European Labour Force Survey Database since 1998. This was the earliest year for which we would be able to compute women’s labour force rates by child status.
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Matysiak, A. (2011). Developments in Fertility and Women’s Labour Supply in Europe. In: Interdependencies Between Fertility and Women's Labour Supply. European Studies of Population, vol 17. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1284-3_2
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