ESRC Centre for Population Change and Divisionof Social Statistics and Demography, University ofSouthampton, Southampton, UK.
Popul Stud (Camb). 2012 Nov;66(3):311-27. doi: 10.1080/00324728.2012.697569. Epub 2012 Aug 14.
The rise in educational enrolment is often cited as a possible cause of the trend to later childbearing in developed societies but direct evidence of its contribution to the aggregate change in fertility tempo is scarce. We show that rising enrolment, resulting in later ages at the end of education, accounts for a substantial part of the upward shift in the mean age at first birth in the 1980s and 1990s in Britain and in France. The postponement of first birth over that period has two components: a longer average period of enrolment and a post-enrolment component that is also related to educational level. The relationship between rising educational participation and the move to later fertility timing is almost certainly causal. Our findings therefore suggest that fertility tempo change is rooted in macro-economic and structural forces rather than in the cultural domain.
受教育人数的增加通常被认为是发达社会生育年龄推迟的一个可能原因，但直接证明其对生育率时变模式整体变化的贡献的证据很少。我们表明，在英国和法国，入学率的上升导致受教育年限的延长，这在很大程度上解释了 20 世纪 80 年代和 90 年代初初育年龄均值的上升。这一时期初育年龄的推迟有两个组成部分：受教育时间的平均长度增加，以及与教育水平相关的入学后部分。受教育程度的提高与生育时间推迟之间的关系几乎是必然的因果关系。因此，我们的研究结果表明，生育率时变模式的变化根植于宏观经济和结构力量，而不是文化领域。
