Between 1960 and 2000, fertility fell sharply in Brazil, but this transition was unevenly distributed in space and time. Using Bayesian spatial statistical methods and microdata from five censuses, we develop and apply a procedure for fitting logistic curves to the fertility transitions in more...

Brazilian fertility has fallen rapidly in the last three decades, even in the Northeast, the country's poorest region. Female sterilization has become the most common contraceptive method in this region, where 44 percent of married women aged 15-49 years were sterilized as of 1996. While in...

Two of the most striking characteristics of contraceptive practice in the world today are the wide variation in patterns of use across countries and the tendency of the distribution of use by method to persist or narrow, even as new methods become available. The argument advanced in this article...