History, Population Policies, and Fertility Decline in Eastern Europe

Abstract

Why does Eastern Europe have the lowest fertility in the world? Most explanations focus on the consequences of upheaval in that region during the 1990s. These so-called “transition” explanations miss a major part of the story. For the Romanian case, we show that the decline in fertility over the 1990s represents the continuation of a longstanding trend that was only interrupted by the extremely efficient pro-natalist policies inaugurated in the 1960s. We conclude that the conventional transition explanations of the 1990s fertility decline in Eastern Europe are incomplete because they fail to give due weight to the effect of population policies.