Will Tomorow's Czechs Have the Fewest Children in Europe?
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| Year of publication | 2004 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | The paper seeks to answer the crucial question of current demographic development in the Czech Republic: Whether the young Czechs have low marriage rate and one of the lowest European fertility rate because they are postponing these events or whether due to deep changes in their value preferences they have changed completely their behavior and will thus keep the low rates also in the future. It does so using international survey data on Population Policy Acceptance carried out in thirteen European countries. It utilizes the questions on intended marital arrangement and on questions on the number of intended children and number of existing children. The results show that the young Czechs do not differ significantly from its European counterparts with respect to opinion on marriage. They do not refuse marriage, however, they prefer unmarried co-habitation before entering into marriage. A significant share of them (50 %), nevertheless does not understand it as necessary to have children only within a marriage, they do not mind having children in unmarried relationships. These data thus support our initial hypothesis that the low Czech marriage rate is not caused by the fact that Czech young people would negate marriage but simply by the fact that so far they have not decided to have children. And if they so far do not want to have children they see no reason to get married. As far as the future fertility is concerned, the hypothetical completed fertility of the cohort of Czech women born between the years 1961 and 1983 would be 1.86. In terms of the current intensity of fertility (1.17) it is a value that is much higher and could lead to a certain optimism. However, if calculations of this hypothetical rate is carried out on a subsample of women who do not have a child yet, were not pregnant at the time of the research, had clear fertility aspirations and were on average much younger, then the value of this index decreased significantly to 1.57. It is the second lowest value among compared European countries with only Germany having it lower (1.49). Thus, as far as the question posed in the title of this article is concerned, the data show that also in the future in the Czech Republic fertility should remain one of the lowest in Europe, nonetheless, the average numbers of children born to a woman should be roughly at the level of the current European average fertility (1.7). |
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