The Netherlands has seen a considerable decline of the period total fertility rate and delayed childbearing, just like all other European countries. The drop in fertility, however, has not been as sharp as in many other regions of Europe. The period total fertility rate in the Netherlands has...

For a very long time, Albania has had one of the highest levels of fertility in Europe: in 2002 the total fertility rate of 2.2 children per woman was the highest in Europe. Although this current level is high, the country has experienced a rapid fertility reduction during the last 50 years: a...

Nonmarital childbearing is becoming an increasingly common path to family formation in Spain. The proportion of births to unmarried mothers has increased from 2% in 1975 to 30.2% in 2007. Along with this marked increase, there has been an important shift in the sociodemographic profile of...

This chapter provides a detailed description of the fertility changes in Bulgaria during recent decades and discusses possible reasons and consequences. It also gives an overview of the steps that the government has undertaken to offset the considerable decline in fertility. Before the fall of...

The demographic transition in Russia was accelerated by several social cataclysms during the "Soviet type" modernization. Frequent changes in the timing of births and marriages engendered a mass "abortion culture". Contraceptive devices of poor quality were produced on a limited scale. The...

Early in the 21st century modern contraception -- primarily hormonal methods, advanced IUDs, sterilization and condoms -- has become the main instrument of birth regulation in Northern and Western Europe and gaining ground in Southern Europe and the formerly state socialist countries of Central...

In this paper I review the concept of tempo effects in demography, focusing on the tempo adjustments proposed by Bongaarts and Feeney and drawing on the work of Ryder and Zeng and Land. I show that the period-shift model that underlies the proposed adjustments can be motivated from an...