Issues in Fertility Transition in the Middle East and North Africa

Fertility in the MENA countries shows that transition is an undeniable trend in this region, where the paradigm of demographic transition seemed to lose all its credibility. Analysis of the proximate determinants of fertility shows that contraception is becoming the leading inhibiting factor, ahead of delayed age at marriage, which was predominant during the seventies and eighties. The paper describes the present heterogeneous situation which includes countries close or below reproduction levels such as Lebanon, Tunisia, and some urban and educated sub-groups in Morocco and others still in the stage of quasi-natural fertility close to or above six children such as Yemen and Palestine. It then attempts to explain the paradoxes and peculiarities of this transition. Examples are analyzed to show how the paradigm of demographic transition fails to explain the atypical character of MENA fertility transition, i.e. higher fertility decreases in countries insufficiently prepared such as Morocco, whereas fertility remained stubbornly high elsewhere in Egypt, Iran, Syria and the Arabian peninsula until the second half of the eighties.