Week Ten: Europe
(Study Questions)
Karin Brewster & Ronald Rindfuss. 2000. Fertility and women's employment in industrialized nations.
- Describe the trend in fertility and the trend in labor force participation in industrialized countries between 1965 and 1998. What do these trends have to do with what Brewster & Rindfuss call the "incompatibility hypothesis?"
- Looking across countries, how were TFR values associated with paid female employment in the 1960s and 1970s? How did this pattern change by the 1990s?
- What institutional arrangements do Brewster & Rindfuss think might explain why countries with higher female labor force participation also tend to have higher fertility?
Lindsey Grant. 2001. Replacement migration: the UN Population Division on European population decline.
- For what kinds of problems does Grant suggest that population decline in Europe would be an advantage rather than a danger or a threat?
- How does Grant suggest that Italy could solve its problem of not enough workers to support a growing older population, without importing hundreds of millions of foreigners?
- If Italy's TFR rose gradually to replacement level by 2020, how big would Italy's population be when it stabilized, compared to the current population? About when would it stabilize? (See Figure 1.)
Elwood Carlson & Rasmus Hoffmann. 2011. The state socialist mortality syndrome.
- Do extreme hard times create life-long higher death risks for some cohorts of people? Could such an effect explain the state socialist mortality syndrome?
- Describe which people experienced the state socialist mortality syndrome documented by Carlson & Hoffmann, in terms of age, sex, and causes of death.
- What link do Carlson & Hoffmann propose between changing labor force structure and the state socialist mortality syndrome? What evidence do they examine, and does it support their explanation?