Research project Rising social inequalities and Swedish fertility decline
Over the past decade fertility rates in Sweden have declined somewhat unexpectedly. This development has occurred in tandem with even greater fertility declines in the other Nordic countries. The projects explores why.
The fall in fertility poses a puzzle for demography since none of the factors commonly associated with fertility decline have been observed during the past decade. Our project aims at investigating these puzzling developments in more detail and to explore the factors that may drive them. We use collections of Swedish register data to study how the parity-specific fertility of women and men in Sweden have changed over the recent and current period of fertility decline.
Project description
We pay special attention to changes in fertility by birth order, socio-economic status, migration background and geographical regions in Sweden in order to examine whether social and gender (in)equalities are increasing, decreasing or shifting. We further investigate the links between labor market transformations and fertility development to understand their role in generating fertility decline and gender and social (in)equalities in fertility outcomes.
Our project also monitors the fertility development during the course and in the immediate wake of the recent Corona epidemic and examines how fertility developments are related to co-occurrences in cohabitation and marriage formation. The results are of high relevance, because all of these changes have major impacts on Swedish society, its welfare state, and the labor market.
Project members
Project managers
Gunnar Andersson
Professor of Demography
Members
Sunnee Billingsley
Professor of Sociology
Stefano Cantalini
Affiliate Researcher
Johan Dahlberg
Affiliate Researcher
Helen Eriksson
Researcher
Martin Kolk
Docent, Senior Lecturer
Gerda Neyer
Researcher
Sofi Ohlsson Wijk
Researcher
Publications
Trends in Completed Fertility by Educational Field: Swedish Men and Women Born 1946–1975
