Portugal: South or East European country?

Lidia Tomé, Universidade de Évora
Maria Mendes, Universidade de Évora

After the severe decline of fertility patterns experienced by the majority of the European countries, several authors start to identify the recuperation of period and cohort fertility. This period of pronounced decline of fertility, known as the period of lowest-low fertility during the 1990s, ended large majority of European countries between 2000 and 2008 and then fertility slowly increased. With regard to cohort fertility recuperation, Goldstein et al. (2011) mentioned that from a group of 34 countries only 5 were still with a decline in fertility levels, from these 5 countries three are from east Europe (Slovakia, Poland and Hungary) one from the south of Europe (Portugal) and the last country is from Asia (Korea). The reference of similarities between Portugal and some East European countries was also referred in the past by Sobotka (2004), were the author makes reference to Portugal as being “the only country of the west Europe where women were having children at a relatively young age”, and also that “Portugal is almost equal to East Germany, which had the latest childbearing patterns among the communist countries”. Assuming the proximity of behaviour in the cohort fertility between Portugal, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, our objective is to observe the period fertility to the mentioned countries and understand were are the similarities between Portugal and the other countries that connected them in the fertility cohort context. The main objective of this work is to understand if period and cohort fertility behaviour and context are the same to South and Eastern European Countries and if the economy, social and cultural context have bigger impact in these countries than in some of their closest ‘neighbors’. With the purpose of understanding the factors that influence fertility postponement, this work will focus in the different TFR adjustments and in regression analysis.