The Great Recession and Fertility in Europe: A Sub-national Analysis

Anna Matysiak, Tomáš Sobotka and Daniele Vignoli
Additional contact information
Tomáš Sobotka: Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital (IIASA, VID/ÖAW, WU), Vienna Institute of Demography/Austrian Academy of Sciences
Daniele Vignoli: University of Florence

European Journal of Population, 2021, vol. 37, issue 1, No 2, 29-64

Abstract: Abstract This study investigates how the changes in labour market conditions and economic growth were associated with fertility before and during the Great Recession in Europe in 2002–2014. In contrast to previous studies, which largely concentrated at the country level, we use data for 251 European regions in 28 European Union (EU) member states prior to the withdrawal of the United Kingdom in January 2020. We apply three-level growth-curve model which allows for a great deal of flexibility in modelling temporal change while controlling for variation in economic conditions across regions and countries. Our findings show that fertility decline was strongly related to unemployment increase; this relationship was significant at different reproductive ages. Deteriorating economic conditions were associated with a stronger decline in fertility during the economic recession as compared with the pre-recession period. This evidence suggests the salience of factors such as broader perception of uncertainty that we could not capture in our models and which rose to prominence during the Great Recession. Furthermore, strongest fertility declines were observed in Southern Europe, Ireland and parts of Central and Eastern Europe, i.e. countries and regions where labour market conditions deteriorated most during the recession period. In Western Europe, and especially in the Nordic countries, fertility rates were not closely associated with the recession indicators.

Keywords: Fertility; Economic recession; Economic uncertainty; Europe; Regional differences; Unemployment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (44)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10680-020-09556-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:eurpop:v:37:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1007_s10680-020-09556-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10680

DOI: 10.1007/s10680-020-09556-y

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Population is currently edited by Helga A.G. de Valk

More articles in European Journal of Population from Springer, European Association for Population Studies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().