Low Fertility and Liberal Democracy in Western Europe

Bibliographic Data

ID7980261
AuthorsC Alison Mcintosh (0000-0002-3660-7061, corresponding author)
Year1981
Volume7
Issue2
Pages181
Publication date1981-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePopulation and Development Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0098-7921 • E-ISSN: 1728-4457
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1972620
OpenAlexW2312495915
LanguageEN
Citations received7

During the past two decades, fertility decline in Europe has been precipitous, and there is an increasing convergence among countries toward a level at which the replacement of the population in the long run is no longer assured. For most of the 1970s, both German Republics and Luxembourg have had more deaths than births each year, and, as a leading demographer asserted at the end of 1978, If the present trends should persist, the population of Europe as a whole and of the USSR would begin to decline at the turn of the century and the US population would stop growing in about 2015. ' Several countries that still have a positive balance between births and deaths are in that position only because they have a relatively large number of women in the prime reproductive years and not because their fertility per woman is high enough to ensure replacement. At the present time, moreover, demographers are increasingly of the opinion that changing patterns of marriage and family formation are such that a spontaneous upturn in fertility, sufficient to assure replacement of the population, is unlikely.2 Low fertility and declining rates of population growth pose difficult problems of adjustment for government and society: changes in age structure and a growing number of elderly dependents-especially those at the oldest ages-strain the financial bases of social security systems; aging work forces introduce unwanted rigidities into the operation of labor markets; depopulation of rural areas calls into question the shape of regional development policies. While many Western economists nowadays appear to believe that economic growth is possible under conditions of population stagnation, albeit at a lower level than in the recent past, they are much less certain about continued growth after a population starts to decline.3 In addition, fluctuations in fertility bring with them discontinuities and problems of accommodation as cohorts of different sizes work their way through the age structure, causing waves of ex

Democracy · Development economics · Economics · Fertility · Liberal democracy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · Demography · European Socioeconomic and Political Studies · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Social Policy and Reform Studies

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