Apéro de la recherche – From bust to boom? Birth and fertility response to the Covid-19 pandemic (Tomas Sobotka) (31/03/2022)

La SDFB et la VVD ont conjointement organisé un séminaire (apéro de la recherche) où Tomas Sobotka a présenté sa recherche sur les conséquences de la pandémie Covid-19 sur la fécondité en Europe.

Résumé de la présentation:

Past economic, health and policy shocks were often associated with a downturn in fertility rates. We use monthly birth data collected by the Human Fertility Database (STFF data series) to analyse an early impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on birth and fertility trends across 29

highly developed countries and regions. Our data cover the period through Spring-Summer 2021, corresponding to the conceptions initiated until Summer-Autumn 2020, i.e., during the first half a year of into the pandemic. We demonstrate that the pandemic has brought huge short-term fluctuations in births and fertility rates. However, birth trends differed sharply during the analysed period, with two distinct shifts observed. First, the initial pandemic “shock” resulted in a steep fertility downturn in most countries, with the sharpest reduction in January 2021. Subsequently, birth rates in most countries showed a surprising short-term “compensatory” recovery linked with the ending of the first wave of the pandemic, with a small baby boom reported especially in March and April 2021. As a result, the pandemic period on the whole did not bring a lasting shift in fertility in most of the analysed countries.