ABSTRACT
Fertility is crucial to the economic and social future of Europe. For more than three decades declining fertility has occupied scholarly and public debates – in the mid-2000s no country had fertility at or above population replacement level. The inability to reproduce Europe’s population is expected to have grave consequences for the future. The prospect of decreasing working-age populations and increasing burdens on welfare states has given rise to the notion of a ‘fertility crisis’. Massive research efforts have accordingly been directed to explain the decline in fertility. Two recent trends pose new questions for research, however. One trend is growing differences in national fertility levels (e.g. Frejka and Sobotka 2008). A seeming paradox is that cross country variation in fertility levels increases even though the main changes in family formation patterns are remarkably similar: later first births, ever more children born outside marriage and growing childlessness. A second trend is an unpredicted, although slight, reversal of fertility decline noted in several countries (Myrskylä et al. 2009). The hypothesis is that fertility may increase again as ‘human development’ reaches the highest current level in both the economic and the social fields. 1 To contribute to current research endeavours in order to understand these new developments is a main aim of this edited volume.
