Institut national d'études démographiques Institut national d'études démographiquesJeudi 17 décembre 1998 de 14 à 15 heures, .
The main objective of this comparative study is to distinguish the effects of different family policy incentives for people's actual reproductive behavior. In the analysis we identify which strategy was more successful, and which conditions should be fulfilled to achieve the desired effects. We want to identify which groups of people (according to level of education achieved or type of employment) have adapted more easily to changes in the generosity of different welfare benefits. More specifically it will be analyzed in which way the national family policies in the 1970s and 1980s have influenced the fertility of the couples, especially the third birth.
The focus is on the arrival of the third child because in countries with low fertility and a strong two-child family norm it is the third child that the parents can choose not to have. A common feature for the two countries is that they have low fertility and a relatively high level of women’s participation in the labor market. These countries have used direct or indirect tools to encourage young people to have more children. France can be distinguished by its explicitly pro-natalist strategy, Sweden has on the contrary used more indirect measures, often with other motivations than to increase fertility. Of these two countries, only Sweden has had a unique rise in fertility in the 1980s. For Sweden we have very good opportunities to investigate changes in policy during the period 1970-1990 as our cohort sample design is done especially with such purpose in mind. A similar analysis can be done for France, as the cohorts interviewed (people in ages 20 to 49) make it possible. Another similarity between the two countries is the timing of the third-child policy measures (1980 for France, and 1982 for Sweden).
We use comparable data: both France and Sweden have recently organized surveys on fertility and family (in 1994 and 1992 respectively) on representative samples. We have information on family and childbearing life-histories, as well as data on educational level and activities for both men and women. We have also rich data on the social characteristics of the interviewed person. This kind of information makes possible to investigate in which ways do the macro- and micro-variables influence the individual fertility behavior.
We construct models of the progression for women and men from second birth to a third birth. The method used is event-history analysis. A woman’s third-birth intensity is the probability that she will experience a third birth next month, given her individual characteristics and given that she did not give birth by the current month. The regressors are grouped in four categories: background variables (religiosity, social group, and number of siblings), demographic variables (age at second birth, civil status, birth interval), variables of human capital and labor-market behavior (educational attainment, activity status), and social-policy measurements (represented by the calendar year).
We expect to show some policy effects on reproductive behavior, as well as to underline the impact of gender roles on third-birth rates.