Childless or Child-fewer? Childlessness and Parity Progression where Fertility is Below Replacement

Birth rates are falling worldwide, in every region. Falling birth rates can be decomposed into two components: (1) an increase in childlessness (i.e., lifetime nulliparity), and (2) fewer children ever born to women who have at least one child (completed cohort fertility among the parous). This paper quantifies the contributions of these two components for women in advanced economies in Europe, North and South America, and southeast Asia, and for recent cohorts in Indian districts. In both samples, we find that the birth rate among parous women is an important component in explaining low overall birth rates. Childlessness explains only 38% of the decline in cohort fertility in the advanced economies in our analysis. In the Indian context, childlessness accounts for only 6% of the difference between high-fertility and below-replacement districts. Moreover, in many country-cohorts and Indian districts, average completed cohort fertility would be below the replacement threshold even when considering only women who do have children—that is, omitting the zeros from the average. This is in tension with widespread recent narratives that attribute falling birth rates to increasing childlessness: To the contrary, in many populations average birth rates even among parents would be low enough eventually to cause depopulation.