'Sexuality in Europe: A twentieth-century history' by Dagmar Herzog (book review)

Copyright @ 2014 The Authors

Child Survival and the Fertility of Refugees in Rwanda after the Genocide

In the 1960s and 1990s, internal strife in Rwanda has caused a mass flow of refugees into neighbouring countries. This paper explores the cumulated fertility of Rwandan refugee women and the survival of their children. To this end, we use a national survey covering 6420 former refugee and non-refugee households conducted between 1999 and 2001. The findings support old-age security theories of reproductive behaviour: refugee women had higher fertility but their children had lower survival chances. Newborn girls suffered more than boys, suggesting that the usual sex differential in child survival observed in most populations changes under extreme living conditions.

Second birth rates across Europe: interactions between women’s level of education and child care enrolment

Fertility differences in Europe are to a large extent due to parity progression after the first child. We therefore use data from the third round of the European Social Survey to investigate second-birth rates in 23 countries. Focusing on the role of education level and child care availability, we argue that child care provision is an important determinant of the opportunity cost of parity progression, particularly for highly educated women. We find that in countries where the highly educated have lower second birth rates than the less educated, total fertility tends to be low, and vice versa. In addition, the effect of the timing of the first child appears to be mediated by education level and child care availability: in countries where large proportions of young children attend formal child care, the more highly educated exhibit much higher second-birth rates, while child care availability does not affect parity progression for the less educated.