Period fertility measures: the construction of different indices and their application to France, 1946-89.
Year: 1994
Type: article
Abstract: Calculating projections of the French population in 1954, Louis Henry considered that it was reasonable to prolong the stable fertility behaviour observed in the years 1949-52. But, among the multitude of indices which had been concocted in the post-war demographic cauldron, which ones should he choose to hold constant? The classic age-specific general fertility rates, the age at marriage- and duration-specific marital fertility rates analysed by Jean Bourgeois-Pichat, their simplified version by marriage duration only, or Henry's own freshly proposed rates by birth order and interval? Depending on the choice made, the number of births would fall by anything between -10,000 and -110,000 in 15 years. Jean-Louis Rallu and Laurent Toulemon examine a new array of synthetic indices for measuring period fertility and apply them to the French data. They come to the same conclusion: that it is risky to represent the demographic phenomena in a single metric.
Source: PubMed
Authors: L Rallu, L Toulemon
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2185623718