The discussion on the causes of the most recent fertility decline in Europe, and in particular on the emergence of lowest low fertility, emphasises the relevance of cultural factors in addition to economic ones. Being part of such a cultural framework, the heterogeneity of preferences concerning...

In Sanderson and Scherbov (2005) we introduced a new forwardlooking definition of age called “prospective age” and argued that its use, along with the traditional backward-looking concept of age, provides a more informative basis upon which to discuss population ageing. Age is a measure of...

In this paper we study changes in the size and the composition of the labour force in five OECD countries from 1983 through 2000. We apply a recent decomposition method to quantify the components of the change over time in the crude labour force rate and the mean age of the labour force. Our...

This paper addresses in a systematic demographic manner the widely discussed question: To what extent can immigration compensate for low fertility in Europe? We begin with a set of 28 alternative scenarios combining seven different fertility levels with four different migration assumptions at...

Various authors find that in OECD countries the cross-country correlation between the total fertility rate and the female labour force participation rate turned from a negative value before the 1980s to a positive value thereafter. Based on pooled time series analysis the literature seems to...