Midi de la recherche

Mathias Lerch (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock), Urban and rural fertility transitions in the developing world

À 12h45, LECL 61

Although the role of urbanization in fertility decline remains debated, few studies have assessed long-term fertility trends by urban/rural place of residence. Relying on successive surveys for 55 countries, we analyze the diffusion of cohort fertility decline in urban and rural areas spanning Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean. We show that, once the fertility transition has started, urban areas experienced a fast decline in all three continents. However, the pace of decline in rural areas has diverged significantly, leading do different evolutions in the rural-urban fertility differential. In Latin America and Caribbean, the differentials followed a classic inverted U-shaped pattern over the fertility transition. In Asia, the differences remained more limited, whereas in Africa they increased monotonically. To increase understanding of this diversity, we study the diffusion of birth limiting behaviors by parity. The implications of these results for urban projections and our understanding of the international variations in the pace of the fertility transition are finally discussed.