How Many Children Would You Like to Have? Exploring Romanian Fertility Decline

Abstract

Since the early 1990s, Romania has experienced population decline. Moreover, the pace of this decline is similar with other Central and Eastern European countries, former members of the Soviet bloc or the former Yugoslavia, and sharper than in Western Europe. Besides migration, of more concern over the long term is the drop in the birth rate. According to data from two nation-wide surveys from late autumn 2014, a plurality of adult Romanians (44%) has fewer children that they would like to have. A similar share of the population (42%) has as many children as they would like to have, while a small minority (14%) has more children than they would like to have. Furthermore, in the less than 36 years of age category, a majority of 63% declared that they have fewer children that they would like to. This paper explores the issue of low births at individual level to see if there is a relationship between several variables (age, gender, urban/rural residence, ethnic group, subjective well-being, education, marital status, use of Internet) and whether and individual has fewer, as many or more children than he or she would like to. The analysis was performed on a consolidated dataset of 2,131 adults, obtained by merging the datasets of two nationwide surveys, which used the same questions and the same sampling techniques.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n2s5p179