The role of childlessness in changes in cohort fertility: Cross-national comparisons of countries in Europe, East Asia, and North America

Background: Much attention has been paid recently to the large decline in period fertility in many countries since 2010. In the Nordic countries and England and Wales much of it can be attributed to the decline in first-birth rates, suggesting higher childlessness. Objective: The aim of this paper is to quantify the contribution of childlessness to changes in cohort completed fertility between the 1960 and 1979 cohorts, for sixteen countries from Europe, East Asia, and North America. Methods: Using Kitagawa exact decomposition, I decompose the changes in cohort completed fertility between two components: the proportion of women who remained childless up to the age of 45 (‘nulliparous’ women) and the average number of children born to women who became mothers by age 45 (‘parous’ women). The data primarily come from the Human Fertility Database. Results: The contribution of childlessness to the change in fertility of the 1960–1979 cohorts is varied. In many countries a rise in childlessness made a large contribution to the decline in their cohort fertility (e.g., Japan, South Korea, Spain, and Poland), but in others its contribution is small. Conclusions: Increases in childlessness played a larger relative role in cohort fertility decline in countries which experienced large declines. Contribution: This paper decomposes the changes in cohort fertility into two components, using a simple exact decomposition and more-recent birth cohorts than in Zeman et al. (2018), and ascertains conditions where the childlessness component was large.