A New Baby Boom?
October 2009 |
One of the most established and accepted standards in the social sciences is that human fertility levels tend to decline as countries advance toward higher levels of social and economic development. But a new paper by Professor of Sociology Hans-Peter Kohler, former demography graduate student Mikko Myrskylä, and Francesco Billari, a professor of demography at the Università Bocconi, challenges this conventional wisdom. (Myrskylä, who graduated this past summer, is now head of the research group on lifecourse dynamics and demographic change at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research.) Published this August in the journal Nature, the paper reaffirms that fertility does decline when countries at low and medium levels of development continue to develop. However, the researchers found that in highly developed countries, further development can reverse the declining trend in fertility.
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