Sweden, Pro-Natalism, Baby Booms and Demographic Transitions, Continued

by Edward Hugh

This is a continuation of my last post, since looking again at what I said, and examining the Swedish experience a bit more closely, I think I may have overdone things a little. This point was made clear to me by a comment from Stefan Geens who drew attention to the rather complicated picture which the Swedish case offers us. The core of the problem is to be found in this statement from Mark Ammerman:

"Despite all the effort Sweden has never since then risen over or even near replacement fertility."

Now as Stefan points out, this statement, as it stands is too strong, and undoubtedly an oversimplification. In support of his assertion Stefan points us to an earlier post on his blog which examined the recent evolution of Sweden's population, and he draws attention to the fact that the number of live births in Sweden has been rising steadily since 1999. In fact detailed information on live births and deaths in Sweden can be found on this page.

Now as I point out to Stefan in comments, one of the problems in looking at this data is to get an accurate measure of what it actually means in terms of the issue which concerns us here, replacement rate fertility. This is normally considered to be a fertility rate of 2.1tfr, but it is just here that we find the problem since TFRs may not be an accurate enough measure of completed fertility, and in particular during periods of rapid birth postponement when many women displace having children to ever later ages.

The total fertility rate is a measure of periodic fertility and uses the sum of the number of children born by women in a specific age (between 16-49) during a given time period in relation to the total number of women in the age group to make an estimate of the fertility rate. The cohort fertility rate (CFR) is a much more accurate measure since it is based on the average number of children which women give birth to during their entire lifetime fertility cycle. Now CFR is important since it measures whether the completed fertility for women is above the replacement level or not, but it has the important disadvantage that it becomes available only after women in any given cohort have completed their fertile life, and in periods of significant fertility fluctuation may reflect more what WAS happening, rather than what the current situation is.

In Sweden, for example, the latest available data is for the 1955-1959 cohort, but we may be rather interested in how fertilty behaviour may have changed when this group is compared with the behaviour of those born in the years 1965-69. Since data for this cohort only becomes available around 2015 this means that it is hard to take policy decisions based on CFRs, or, at least, it is possible, but important details may be missed, and hence the fairly widespread use of TFRs to try and get a handle on the process of fertility change.

To cut a long story short the reading on CFRs for Sweden to date have been not far short of replacement level, since they have been around the 2.0 mark. See, for example, this paper:

Why does Sweden have such high fertility?

By current European standards, Sweden has had a relatively high fertility in recent decades. During the 1980s and 1990s, the annual Total Fertility Rate (TFR) for Sweden undulated considerably around a level just under 1.8, which is a bit lower than the corresponding level in France and well above the level in West Germany. (In 2004 the Swedish TFR reached 1.76 on an upward trend.) The Swedish completed Cohort Fertility Rate (CFR) was rather constant at 2 for the cohorts that produced children in the same period; for France it stayed around 2.1 while the West-German CFR was lower and declined regularly to around 1.6.

So if the question we want to answer is: does Sweden currently have replacement (or near replacement) fertility, the only honest answer is that we don't really know. Having said that it does appear that Mark's original statement is a bit too strong, even if the current cohorts do not turn in replacement level fertility, they may well be not too far short of it.

So, in completing my mea culpa, I would make the following points:

1/ The important issue which I wanted to stress was that what we are dealing with here is not a simple boom-bust phenomenon, but rather a steady and continuous decline in fertility, which (if we strip out the US and Israel) seems to have taken place across the entire developed world, and which is now also rapidly occuring in the parts of the third world which are developing economically. In this context many countries which understandably seek to place an emphasis on reducing their fertility to replacement levels will almost certainly find it difficult to stop the decline at that point, and will in all probability move to fertility levels which are well below replacement level.

2/ Pro-natalism is important, but even in the society where most effort has been placed on a systematic pro-natal welfare system sustaining fertility at replacement levels has not proved easy (if indeed it has in fact been achieved).

3/ The quantity of resources necessary for the kind of policy Sweden has pursued are significant, and whilst they may be feasible in a comparatively rich society like Sweden, with a high level of awareness of the issues involved, introducing such a policy and devoting the quantity of resources required in less economically affluent societies, and in particular in the context of the situation that below replacement fertility and rapid increases in life expectancy both tend to occur simultaneously, will not be easy. Simple lump-sum cash payments - which of course are not unwelcome - are unlikely to make a substantial impact and in particular not in those societies which have already fallen below the 1.5tfr level.

4/ The Swedish (and Scandinavian in general) case also draws our attention to the critical difference between those societies with "near replacement" fertility (where pyramid sustainability is not resolved, but at least the relatively higher fertility makes the transition easier) and those who have fallen into the lowest-low fertility category. The need to avoid the critical drop below a TFR of 1.5 cannot be over-emphasised. Many societies already find themselves in this uncomfortable position (and the list of these is a lot longer than many imagine, including most of Souther Europe, Eastern Europe, the Asian Tigers, Japan and now possibly China), but it is important to try and prevent others meeting the same fate, which is why there is an urgent need in the developing third world to draw attention to the urgency of putting pro-natalist policies in place as these societies approach replacement level. The lesson of Southern Europe and the Tigers seems to be that if you do not do this you will almost certainly overshoot and find yourself in the lowest-low category. Bottom line: in trying to raise this awareness the Swedish model is, in fact, not without some importance.