This report summarizes presentations and discussions at the Workshop on the Social Processes Underlying Fertility Change in Developing Countries, organized by the Committee on Population of the National Research Council (NRC) in Washington, D.C., January 29-30, 1998. Fourteen papers were presented at the workshop; they represented both theoretical and empirical perspectives and shed new light on the role that diffusion processes may play in fertility transition. These papers served as the basis for the discussion that is summarized in this report.

This volume is part of an effort to review what is known about the determinants of fertility transition in developing countries and to identify lessons that might lead to policies aimed at lowering fertility. It addresses the roles of diffusion processes, ideational change, social networks, and mass communications in changing behavior and values, especially as related to childbearing. A new body of empirical research is currently emerging from studies of social networks in Asia (Thailand, Taiwan, Korea), Latin America (Costa Rica), and Sub-Saharan Africa (Kenya, Malawi, Ghana). Given the potential significance of social interactions to the design of effective family planning programs in high-fertility settings, efforts to synthesize this emerging body of literature are clearly important.

This book has a strong theoretical focus and is unique in addressing both mortality and fertility over the full span of human history. It examines the demographic transition in the change in the human condition from high mortality and high fertility to low mortality and low fertility. It asks if fluctuating populations is a new phenomenon, or if there has long been an inherent tendency in Man to maximize survival and to control family size.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most countries in Europe and English-speaking countries outside Europe experienced a fertility transition, where fertility fell from high levels to relatively low levels. England and the other English-speaking countries experienced this from the 1870s, while fertility in Australia began to fall in the 1880s. This book investigates the fertility transition in Tasmania, the second settled colony of Australia, using both statistical evidence and historical sources. The book examines detailed evidence from the 1904 New South Wales Royal Commission into the Fall in the Birth Rate, which the Commissioners regarded as applying not only to NSW, but to every state in Australia. Many theories have been proposed as to why fertility declined at this time: theories of economic and social development; economic theories; diffusion theories; the spread of secularisation; increased availability of artificial methods of contraception; and changes in the rates of infant and child mortality. The role of women in the fertility transition has generally been ignored. The investigation concludes that fertility declined in Tasmania in the late 19th century in a period of remarkable social and economic transformation, with industrialisation, urbanisation, improvements in transport and communication, increasing levels of education and opportunities for social mobility. One of the major social changes was in the status and role of women, who became the driving force behind the fertility decline.

In this book the author maintains that fertility declines independently of its “background”. Normally, fertility decline is thought to occur as a result of alteration in the socioeconomic background such as the decline of the infant mortality rate, urbanization, the level of literacy, and so on. This point of view has been regarded as equivalent to “demographic transition”. However, the concept of demographic transition is so superficial, naïve and unscientific that it should be applied merely to the ostensible demographic phenomena, not to the mechanisms of fertility decline. The author regards this way of thinking, i.e., that the occurrence of fertility decline is dependent on socioeconomic background, as the “background dependence” of fertility decline. On the contrary, there is considerable counterevidence to the background dependence of fertility decline. The argument is made that background dependence lacks positive evidence and predictability and consequently, is falsifiable. That decisive counterevidence is introduced in this book. The author revives the diffusion hypothesis of fertility decline at the point of the number of children per couple as the reaction–diffusion process in a mathematical equation. Fertility decline in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries occurred as a reaction–diffusion process independent of socioeconomic background. In Japan as well, fertility (the number of children per couple) declined independently of background. This book provides ample evidences persuasively demonstrating this independence of fertility in Japan. The occurrence of marriage is also independent of socioeconomic background. Thus the author formalizes the marriage function as an integral equation of marriage probability, as a result, it demonstrates a better fit with the observed data than does any other marriage function. Occurrence of marriage is almost solely dependent on the density of marriages that occur in a given subspace.

This volume summarizes the major findings of the Princeton European Fertility Project. The Project, begun in 1963, was a response to the realization that one of the great social revolutions of the last century, the remarkable decline in marital fertility in Europe, was still poorly understood. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.