The editors of the present Special Collection of the electronic journal Demographic Research take pleasure in making the Collection available to the research community and the general public. The Collection’s principal focus is the demographic analysis of European fertility trends, their determinants, and public policies modifying childbearing. The collection is the outcome of an international comparative project. It includes nineteen country studies, eight topical overview chapters, and a summary.childbearing, Europe

Jan M. Hoem

English

Research Papers in Economics

Demographic Research   a free, expedited, online journal 
of peer-reviewed research and commentary  
in the population sciences published by the  
Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research 
Konrad-Zuse Str. 1, D-18057 Rostock · GERMANY 
www.demographic-research.org 
 
 
 
 
 
DEMOGRAPHIC RESEARCH  
 
VOLUME 19, ARTICLE 1, PAGES 1-4 
PUBLISHED 01 JULY 2008 
http://www.demographic-research.org/Volumes/Vol19/1/ 
DOI:  10.4054/DemRes.2008.19.1 
 
Reflexion  
 
Preface:  
Childbearing Trends and Policies in Europe  
 
Jan M. Hoem 
 
This publication is part of Special Collection 7: Childbearing Trends and 
Policies in Europe (http://www.demographic-research.org/special/7/)   
 
© 2008 Hoem. 
 
This open-access work is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 
NonCommercial License 2.0 Germany, which permits use, reproduction & distribution in  any medium 
for non-commercial purposes,  provided the original author(s) and source are given credit.  
See http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/de/ 
 
 Table of Contents 
    Preface to “Childbearing Trends and Policies in Europe”  1 
    
  List of Peer Reviewers   4 
    Demographic Research: Volume 19, Article 1 
reflexion 
http://www.demographic-research.org   1 
Preface:  
Childbearing Trends and Policies in Europe  
Jan M. Hoem
1  
The editors of the present Special Collection of the electronic journal Demographic 
Research take pleasure in making the Collection available to the research community 
and the general public. The Collection’s principal focus is the demographic analysis of 
European fertility trends, their determinants, and public policies modifying 
childbearing. The collection is the outcome of an international comparative project. It 
includes nineteen country studies, eight topical overview chapters, and a summary.  
Tomas Frejka has acted as the project’s primus motor and main editor. Tomáš 
Sobotka, Jan M. Hoem, and Laurent Toulemon have supported him as co-editors. The 
Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research has provided organisational support.  
Initial discussions about this project began in the summer of 2005. By the fall of that 
year the rationale for the project had crystallised. The following premises served as our 
point of departure:  
 
•  Throughout Europe fertility had reached below-replacement levels; 
•  Demographers and policy makers were increasingly becoming concerned about 
possible long-term deleterious consequences;  
•  A considerable number of investigations concerning fertility trends and their 
determinants within countries had been undertaken, as well as some international 
comparative research;  
•  Comparative surveys on changes in family and fertility attitudes and behavior have 
been conducted in many countries, and the resulting datasets have been made 
available. 
 
Despite the value of existing work, we thought that a meaningful contribution 
could be made if a large number of country studies of childbearing trends and policies 
were to be executed in a coordinated fashion. This would facilitate international 
comparability and provide a basis for updating a continent-wide understanding of the 
situation. We also envisioned that countries might learn from each other’s experiences 
in determining which policies can be applied to reach desired goals.  
                                                           
1 Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany. E-mail: hoem@demogr.mpg.de  Hoem: Preface: Childbearing Trends and Policies in Europe  
2   http://www.demographic-research.org 
Another reflection was instrumental in our decision to embark on this project. We 
believed that the mechanisms generating childbearing trends in Western European 
countries, including the Nordic and Mediterranean ones, were reasonably well 
understood. By contrast, knowledge about the transformations of family formation and 
childbearing in the formerly socialist countries of Europe was uneven and fragmentary. 
Our obvious goal was to contribute to a better documentation and understanding of 
developments across Europe. Thus a project proposal was developed in the fall of 2005, 
and the project was launched. 
The selection of countries was based on the following considerations: We did not 
strive for complete coverage of all countries in Europe, but rather aimed for a 
reasonable geographical representation and attempted to include all countries with more 
than 15 million inhabitants. Our collection contains chapters for countries for which we 
have managed to find qualified authors who would commit themselves to the 
demanding task of writing a chapter on the country’s recent fertility and family 
developments at short notice. 
The overview chapters cover the following topics: 
 
1. Contemporary levels and trends of fertility in Europe  
2. Changing ultimate-parity distribution and family size  
3. Birth regulation (contraception and induced abortion)  
4. Changing family and partnership behaviour  
5. Childbearing during the societal transition in Central and Eastern Europe  
6. The diverse faces of the Second Demographic Transition in Europe  
7. The rising importance of migrants for childbearing in Europe  
8. The impact of public policies on European fertility. 
 
Each of these chapters summarises findings of the country chapters, is set in the 
framework of the general literature on the given topic, and includes additional analyses.  
We adopted a strict regime of peer review with the following elements. First drafts 
of the country chapters were pre-reviewed by the editors, revised by the authors, 
submitted to reviewers selected from the journal’s Scientific Review Board, revised 
again, language edited, and were revised once more by the original author(s). Each 
overview chapter was written by one or two editors, pre-reviewed by other editors, 
revised, submitted to reviewers, and finally revised again in the light of their comments. 
(A list of all peer reviewers for the project can be found at the end of this preface.) This 
whole process was conducted under the time pressure caused by my imminent 
retirement, which occurred at the beginning of 2008, and the editing work progressed 
under Tomas Frejka’s unflagging supervision throughout. Renee Flibotte-Lüskow has 
managed the project firmly and with her usual sense of humour. Technical support, Demographic Research Volume 19, Article 1 
http://www.demographic-research.org   3 
language editing, and layout services were organized by staff at the Max Planck 
Institute.  
Because Demographic Research has an arrangement with Special Collections, it 
has been possible to publish this collection in one go in mid-2008, as the first part of 
Volume 19. The editors chose to use this medium because it gives free online access to 
all the chapters, because it is unusually cost-effective, and because this was the optimal 
way to get the material into print so quickly, i.e., within less than three years of the 
project initiation in the fall of 2005. The material is therefore available fully integrated 
into the journal from the day of publication, and can be easily accessed at no cost to the 
reader using the journal’s search engine. The Special Collection can be downloaded as 
open access material, and bound versions are available through a print-on-demand 
service. We have donated such books to some 50 depositary libraries and research 
centres.  
The editors are impressed by the loyalty with which authors and collaborators have 
followed instructions and kept deadlines.  We want to express our profound gratitude to 
the country teams of authors and to the reviewers for their collegial spirit and ability to 
get the job done under very strict time constraints. As emeritus director of the Max 
Planck Institute, I want to express my great appreciation to Tomas Frejka for initiating 
the project and firmly leading the work. The editorial team wants to thank the Max 
Planck Institute for making the resources of the electronic journal available, and for its 
general organizational support.  
 
 
Rostock,  1  July  2008.      Jan  M.  Hoem 
 
 
 Hoem: Preface: Childbearing Trends and Policies in Europe  
4   http://www.demographic-research.org 
Peer Reviewers of country and overview chapters: 
 
Gunnar Andersson 
Vladimir Anisimov 
Pau Baizán 
Gijs Beets  
Tommy Bengtsson 
Neil Bennett  
Laura Bernardi 
Alain Blum  
Larry Bumpass  
Thomas K. Burch 
Elwood D. Carlson 
David A. Coleman 
Henriette Engelhardt 
Frances  Goldscheider 
Joshua Goldstein 
Andy Hinde  
Vladimíra Kantorová 
Kathleen E. Kiernan  
Hans-Peter Kohler 
Irena Kotowska 
Øystein Kravdal 
Hill Kulu 
Ron Lesthaeghe 
Aart C. Liefbroer 
 
Marc Luy  
Torkild Hovde Lyngstad 
Peter F. McDonald 
Clara Mulder  
Michael Murphy  
Gerda Neyer  
Máire Ní Bhrolcháin 
Brienna Perelli-Harris 
Dimiter Philipov 
Harriet B. Presser 
Thomas W. Pullum  
Jean-Louis Rallu 
Marit Rønsen 
Robert Schoen  
Steve Smallwood 
Maria Rita Testa 
Elizabeth Thomson  
Jacques Vallin  
Dirk van de Kaa  
Nico van Nimwegen 
Andres Vikat  
Charles F. Westoff  
Frans Willekens  
Kryštof Zeman 
 
 

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