Fertility, Family, and Social Policy in Contemporary Western Europe

IN ALL WESTERN EUROPEAN countries, now even including Ireland, period total fertility rates are below, and often well below, replacement level, and population growth rates are close to zero. But behind the appearance of demographic stabilization lie wide differences between countries. Most notably, the longstanding differential in fertility between the north and south of Europe has reversed. Mediterranean countries, which are still commonly labeled as traditional, Catholic, and family oriented, exhibit unprecedentedly low fertility levels for peacetime conditions: period fertility rates have been approximately 1.2 children per woman since the early 1990s. In some regions of Spain (such as in Catalonia and the Basque country) and of Italy (Emilia-Romagna, Liguria, Venezia-Friula, and Tuscany), the fertility rate is below 1 child per woman. In contrast, in Scandinavia, fertility rates are much higher-in the neighborhood of 2. Should present levels persist, then in the latter case population size, with some help from a manageable inflow of immigrants, would remain stable, while in Southern Europe several countries would face the risk of eventually rapid population decline, with the attendant extreme forms of population aging (Chesnais 1995). As past population projections show, the emergence of such a geographic reversal was wholly unforeseen by demographers. In this note I discuss this differentiation in Western European fertility patterns, first by examining the widening contrast in fertility behavior between two countries: Italy and Sweden. In trying to explain the fertility differential that has emerged in the last two decades, I focus on the contrasting status of women in these two countries.