Populations of the industrial world — a convergent demographic community?

Europe's populations have emerged from a long period of demographic transition. The old demographic anciens regimes no longer exist. The end‐point of demographic transition is often assumed to be convergence to a new stable post‐transitional regime. Convergence in demographic characteristics among all European countries might be expected to follow their acquisition of common economic and social structures. Remaining differences would then merely reflect different positions on the same trajectory to a common statistical destination. However, socio‐economic convergence remains incomplete and cannot be assumed to bring uniform demographic responses in its wake. This paper measures demographic convergence in industrial societies to see if they are acquiring a common pattern. Despite some clear upper limits to demographic variables, for example fertility, in proportional terms international demographic variation remains high and is declining only slowly, if at all. Either the expectation of convergence is wrong, or we are looking for it too soon.