A non-stationary stochastic process model of completed marital fertility in Japan

Abstract

The historic decline in completed marital fertility has long been studied for its effects on the Demographic Transition in Europe. I applied logistic models to the actual data and test for statistical fit of the model to the data. I explain the logistic patterns in declining completed marital fertility rates assume that, as Western countries underwent diffusion of family limitation, individuals observed the behavior of others in their and adjoining cohorts. Social integration is then assumed to have lead to imitative processes in which individuals increasingly reduced their fertility in through processes of endogenous feedback. I demonstrate that a non-stationary stochastic process is able to explain the change of the distribution of the ratio of the number of the children with current hypothesis of the underlying mechanism. It is also more parsimonious and provides a good fit to the observed change of the ratio distribution of the number if children that traditional approaches have not done.