The Demographic Transition Revisited as
a Global Process1
David S. Reher*
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
Keywords: demographic transition; fertility
control; fertility decline; mortality decline;
developing world
INTRODUCTION
I
t is often held that the demographic transition
in Europe was a unique historical event, one
quite distinct from the more recent process of
fertility decline under way in much of the world,
and that there is in fact very little to be learned for
the developing world from the `historical' expe-
rience of fertility transition. This attitude has not
always been so predominant and, in its origins
and development, demographic transition theory
was supposed to help us explain fertility change
in the light of historical (European) experience
(Notestein, 1945). Yet persistently high fertility in
developing countries during the 1950s and 1960s
appeared to debunk much of the theory, leading
many scholars to abandon it as effectively of little
use for understanding the world today.
This negative view warrants reassessment in
the light of the extremely intense process of
fertility and mortality decline under way nearly
everywhere in the world. By the middle years of
the twentieth century, mortality was declining
rapidly everywhere, and over the past 40 years
rapid fertility decline has ended up affecting
the vast majority of the world's population.
The current reductions in vital rates in the deve-
loping world appear to have many points in
common with the demographic transition in
Europe, although important differences emerge
as well. The process of transition in Europe has
much to teach us about the recent past and
present of the demographic transitions under
way in Africa, America and Asia, and also gives
us a plausible blueprint for the future.
POPULATION, SPACE AND PLACE
Popul. Space Place 10, 19­41 (2004)
Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/psp.313
Copyright  2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
ABSTRACT
With dramatic declines in fertility taking place
throughout the world, it is increasingly
important to understand the demographic
transition as a global process. While this
universality was a cornerstone of classic
transition theories, for many decades it was
largely neglected by experts because fertility
in the developing world did not seem to
follow the expected pattern. When comparing
earlier and more recent transition experiences,
important similarities and disparities can be
seen. Everywhere mortality decline appears to
have played a central role for fertility decline.
The differences in the timing of the response
of fertility to mortality decline, with very
small gaps historically and prolonged ones
in more recent transitions, plus the much
more rapid decline in vital rates in many
developing countries, constitute an important
challenge to any general explanation of the
process. The specific characteristics of recent
transitions have led to decades of higher
population growth rates, and promise to give
way to much more rapid dynamics of
population ageing in many countries. This
may limit the ability of newcomers to take
full advantage of the demographic transition
for the social and economic modernisation of
their societies. Copyright  2004 John Wiley
& Sons, Ltd.
Received 15 April 2003; revised 21 July 2003; accepted 21 July 2003
*Correspondence to: D. S. Reher, Departamento de Sociologia
II, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Campus de Somos-
aguas, 28223 Pozuelo de Alarcon, Madrid, Spain.
E-mail: dreher@cps.ucm.es
In a period of approximately 100 years, deci-
sive demographic change began the world over.
Figure 1 attempts to track a process in which two
clear phases of fertility transition can be seen. In
an initial one, stretching from the latter part of
the nineteenth century and lasting until about
1930, mostly European populations took the lead
in implementing different measures of fertility
control. During the second half of the century,
fertility decline spread nearly everywhere in the
world, with very few exceptions.2
During the
demographic transition in Europe, the onset of
fertility change in a majority of countries was
spread out over four decades, and over more
than 60 years in the different provinces of Europe
(Coale and Treadway, 1986: 38). Once it began in
the rest of the world, fertility decline spread at an
even faster pace. History is filled with examples
of processes which today are considered coher-
ent, unified historical processes, but which took
far more than 100 years to consolidate. The
demographic transition can and should be con-
sidered one of these processes with two or more
fairly clearly identifiable stages. These stages
have specific characteristics, but they do not
negate the common elements affecting the entire
process. In our enquiry, we will find justification
for many of the basic tenets of demographic
transition theory which, for want of a proper
perspective, ran aground on the shoals of
recalcitrant empirical realities sometime during
the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
ESTIMATING BASIC PARAMETERS OF
DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITIONS
Our ability to understand the empirical contours
of the demographic transition is severely con-
strained by the availability of requisite data.
Here, great disparities continue to exist by
country and by continent. A number of European
countries, plus a few nations outside Europe,
have time series for a limited number of indica-
tors stretching back to the early decades of the
twentieth century, and in some cases they exist
for considerably longer periods of time. Most
of these series make use of civil registration
systems, and those that begin earlier are based on
parish registers.3
On this point, Europe, and espe-
cially the northern parts of the continent, enjoys
a clear-cut advantage over the rest of the world,
where in many cases there are no vital data avail-
able at all before the central decades of the twen-
tieth century and even then they are flawed. Our
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25
30
35
40
45
pre
1910
1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000
Numberofcountries
Europe
Asia
South America
North America
Africa
Figure 1. Date of onset of fertility transition, by country and continent.
understanding of changes in vital rates in much
of the world before the mid-twentieth century
will be tentative at very best.
Since the 1950s, the United Nations has made
a great effort to compile data for a wide range
of countries which have been published in the
Demographic Yearbook. Recently these data have
been brought together in an extremely useful
commemorative volume and CD Rom spanning
the entire second half of the century (United
Nations Statistics Division, 2000). This volume
contains much of the more recent data that will
be used in this paper. Even so, in many develop-
ing countries basic data have continued to be
flawed until very recently. Where this is the case,
use has been made of the estimates of the Popu-
lation Division of the United Nations.4
In any
case, the reliability of vital statistics in much of
the world continues to be far from perfect, and
the work of the United Nations in gathering data
is essential to our understanding of demographic
trends in the world.5
The countries used for this
study are shown in Appendix Table A.
There are only a limited number of demo-
graphic indicators available for a large number of
countries over a significant period of time. The
indicators used are crude birth (CBR) and death
(CDR) rates, the rate of natural increase (CBR -
CDR) and infant mortality rates (IMR). More
sophisticated indicators would have been
desirable, but their use would have drastically
restricted the number of countries and the time
spans included in this paper. Among the prob-
lems affecting the measures used here, the effects
of age structure on crude rates cause considerable
uncertainty, especially in more recent years, and
using an indicator of total fertility instead of
one of marital fertility makes pinpointing the
existence of conscious fertility control much
more difficult. In any case, these indicators will
enable us to chart the basic changes over time of
mortality and fertility fairly accurately.
A database was created with quinquennial
values of these indicators. Countries were
grouped by the timing of the onset of fertility
decline rather than by continent. This is not the
only strategy possible, but it is the most straight-
forward one, especially considering the degree of
heterogeneity holding in different continents and
the fact that in many cases mortality decline
appears to have already begun long before the
data first become available. When fertility decline
also appears to have begun before data become
available, as is the case with many parts of the
former Soviet Union, these countries were not
used. The database includes 145 countries which
were organised into the following categories. The
forerunners are those countries where the onset of
fertility decline began before 1935. For the follow-
ers it began between 1950 and 1964, for the trail-
ers it took place between 1965 and 1979, and for
the latecomers fertility decline only began after
1980.6
The rates included in the database for each
of these categories are simply the unweighted
means of the available values.7
Pinpointing the date of the initial decline can
be tricky and involves a certain degree of arbi-
trariness. For the purposes of this paper, it has
been set at the beginning of the first quinquen-
nium after a peak, where fertility declines by at
least 8% over two quinquennia and never
increases again to levels approximating the orig-
inal take-off point.8
In many developing coun-
tries, this is not a difficult decision to make. In
others, however, especially those with very long
time series and relatively early transitions, both
fertility and mortality tend to float gradually
downwards. Here, we have preferred to choose
the moment in which the slope of decline inten-
sified rather than its original starting point.
One of the issues that interests us in this paper
is the existence of conscious fertility control, yet
gradual declines in overall fertility can be the
result of nuptiality restrictions and other factors
as well.
In a number of European countries, where par-
ticularly long time series are available, it is appar-
ent that mortality and occasionally fertility were
declining more or less gradually as early as the
latter part of the eighteenth century. This process
had important implications for these countries,
although here it has not been considered, at least
in a formal sense, as a part of the demographic
transition. In some ways it can be said that in
these countries (England, Sweden, France, etc.)
by the early years of the twentieth century the
demographic transition had been under way for
over a century, characterised first by gradual
declines in vital rates and subsequently by far
more abrupt ones (Wrigley, 1985). With the
exception of France, most of the earlier gradual
declines in fertility appear to have been achieved
mainly by means of progressively restricted
marriage. During the subsequent stage of rapid
The Demographic Transition Revisited 21
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transition, fertility control within marriage
became the key factor. We have chosen to focus
on this last period of rapid transition which coin-
cides with the onset of the demographic transi-
tion in other societies.
Figure 2 contains the basic profiles of the
demographic transition for each of these groups.
Among the forerunners, pre-transition crude birth
rates (CBR) hover near 35 per thousand, with
mortality some ten points lower. Very gradual
fertility decline appeared during the later part of
the nineteenth century, accelerating after 1910.
Mortality decline started somewhat earlier, and it
too was fairly gradual and constant, with the
exception of the increase caused by the great
influenza pandemic of 1918. During much of the
period shown, natural growth remained fairly
constant, between 10 and 13 per thousand, and
only decreased sharply during times of crisis and
then again after 1970. The forerunners are made
up of 18 European and 6 American countries.
Within this group interesting differences can be
observed. Fertility was always considerably
higher in the Americas than in Europe, both
before and during the transition.9
Moreover, in
America the baby boom of the 1950s and 1960s
was very important, with fertility once again
approaching 30 per thousand, as opposed to
Europe where any boom was only slightly
perceptible. Pre-transitional mortality was also
much higher in the Americas, although after the
1890s there was little difference. The great con-
trast, however, is in natural growth rates, which
were always much higher in the Americas (15­18
per thousand) than in Europe (10­11). Despite the
similarities in the onset and basic pattern of the
demographic transition, among the forerunners
intriguing differences emerge.10
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1870-74
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1930-34
1950-54
1970-74
1990-94
Vitalrates(perthousand)
CBR
CDR
NatGr
0
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25
30
35
40
45
50
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1930-34
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CBR CDR
NatGr
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CBR
CDR
NatGr
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1930-34
1950-54
1970-74
1990-94
VitalRates(perthousand)
CBR
CDR
NatGr
Forerunners
Trailers
Followers
Latecomers
Figure 2. Profiles of demographic transition.
Among the followers, pre-transition levels of
crude birth rates ranged between 35 and 40 per
thousand, and death rates between 25 and 30 per
thousand. Mortality decline was first visible in
the mid-1920s and continued unabated through-
out the period under study. Fertility, on the other
hand, continued unchanged until the decade of
the 1950s when it too started its precipitous fall.
The result of this delay was that natural growth
rates surged well above 25 per thousand during
the 1950s and early 1960s, before returning to
much lower levels in more recent years. By the
century's end, natural increase continued to be
higher than during the pre-transitional period. It
is worth noting that all of the countries in this
group (see Appendix Table A) either show fairly
strong European influences, ethnically (as in the
case of those countries from North America) or
as ruling powers both present and past, or, as in
the case of Japan, India or Singapore, they occupy
very special regional positions as well. Asian and
African followers cannot be considered represen-
tative of the majority of the countries in these
continents.
For the trailers, information is considerably less
reliable before 1950, mainly because only 11 of
the 47 countries in this group (most of them in
the Americas) have time series beginning before
1945. Pre-transition birth rates were well above
40 per thousand and mortality was between 25
and 30 per thousand.11
The mortality transition
appears to have started during the 1930s, while
fertility did not decline until around 1970, with
the result that natural growth rates exceeded
25 per thousand during the 1960s and into the
early 1970s. Much of the rest of Latin America
plus numerous Asian and African countries
make up this group. The only consistent differ-
ence between the followers and the trailers is to be
found in the slightly earlier onset of fertility and
mortality decline among the followers.
Among the latecomers, there are no data before
1950 and at that point mortality appears to have
been already in the process of very rapid decline,
although levels suggest that decline only began
some time during the 1940s.12
Fertility, on the
other hand, did not begin to decline until the
1980s, and even then reductions cannot be con-
sidered truly intense until quite recently. Popula-
tion growth rates were near 30 per thousand
during the 1980s. The latecomers are almost
entirely made up of African and Asian countries.
Our understanding of the demographic transi-
tion among the latecomers is severely limited
because in most of these countries it has only
recently begun.
The basic profiles of the demographic transi-
tion in these different groups of countries are
summarised in Table 1 and deserve careful
scrutiny. Some of these will be mentioned here
and discussed in greater detail in subsequent sec-
tions of this paper. Pre-decline levels of fertility
and mortality appear to have been lower for
those countries with earlier declines and higher
for those with later transitions, although with
mortality data, limitations make it difficult to be
completely sure on this point. The gap between
fertility and mortality decline is short for the fore-
runners (5­10 years), considerably longer for
followers and trailers (30 years), and longest for
latecomers (45 years). Once the decline in vital
rates sets in, it appears to be much faster for those
countries experiencing demographic transition
more recently, and considerably slower for the
forerunners. This disparity in the rates of decline
is greater for fertility than for mortality, but
is present everywhere. Finally, pre-transition
natural growth rates do not appear to have
varied substantially in countries where long-
standing time series exist, although the gap in the
onset of decline makes growth rates far lower
among the forerunners than for other groups.
These rates appear to be highest in those coun-
tries that have the highest pre-transition vital
rates and start their transitions most recently.
In fact, followers and trailers experienced natural
rates of increase above 25 per thousand for about
15 years, as opposed to the latecomers where it
was above those levels for more than 35 years.
The disparities in growth rates existing at the end
of the twentieth century merely reflect the posi-
tions occupied by each group of countries in their
own particular demographic transitions.
SHARED CHARACTERISTICS AND
DIVERGENT EXPERIENCES
Viewing the demographic transition as a global
process vindicates a number of the basic postu-
lates of demographic transition theory, while it
calls others into question. There is much to be
learned from recent transitions for understand-
ing the general process, and developing nations
continue to have much to learn from the experi-
The Demographic Transition Revisited 23
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ence of the forerunners, who continue to be
several decades ahead of them along the cycle of
transition. The profiles of the demographic tran-
sition presented above have enough characteris-
tics in common to be considered manifestations
of a more general process. Yet the great differ-
ences also remind us of the heterogeneity of that
very process. Addressing some of the issues
raised by these data will occupy much of the rest
of our paper.
Similarities
The most important shared characteristic is that
everywhere, without exception, mortality decline
appears to have preceded fertility decline in a
clear-cut way. The role of the reduction of mor-
tality as an essential starting point for the demo-
graphic transition is one of the fundamental
premises of Notestein's formulation of the
theory, and it appears to be thoroughly vindi-
cated by this large set of national aggregate data
(Notestein, 1945; Davis, 1963). Even so, in recent
years mortality has received rather less than
enthusiastic support from many researchers.
Ambiguous and contradictory empirical results
on this point led Francine van de Walle (1986:
233) in her summary chapter for the Princeton
Fertility Project to state: `At the end of this quest,
we cannot report that the historical evidence con-
firms that the declines of infant mortality led
to the decline in fertility.' This view is shared
by many other authors (Livi Bacci, 1971: 121­4;
1977: 205­213; Coale, 1973; Knodel, 1974: 167­
85; Lesthaeghe, 1977: 171­6; Haines, 1998). Other
studies have suggested the existence of only very
weak and often insignificant links between mor-
tality and fertility, both in historical and contem-
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Table 1. Summary indicators of demographic transition (by category).
Indicator Forerunners Followers Trailers Latecomers Total
Onset fertility decline 1905 1950­60 1965­75 1980­2000
Pre-decline birth rates 33­35 36­40 41­44 46­47
CBR decline (in 10 years) 0.92 0.79 0.84 0.89
CBR decline (in 20 years) 0.84 0.63 0.74 ?
Time to 50% decline 75 30 ? ?
Time to 10 point decline 30 15 15 ?
Onset of mortality decline (CDR) 1895 1925 1930 1945­50
Pre-decline death rates 22­25 26­29 27­30 33­34
CDR decline (in 10 years) 0.88 0.78 0.90 0.87
CDR decline (in 20 years) 0.77 0.66 0.66 0.74
Time to 50% decline 50 30 30 45
Time to 10 point decline 45 20 20 30
Gap mortality­fertility decline 5­10 30 30 40­45
Onset of infant mortality decline 1895 1920 1935 ?
Pre-decline IMRs 170­190 200­220 180­220 180­220+
IMR decline (in 10 years) 0.91 0.83 0.87 ?
IMR decline (in 20 years) 0.81 0.73 0.73 ?
Time to 50% decline 40 30 35 ?
Time to 50 point decline 30 25 25 ?
Natural growth rates: pre-decline 9­11 7­11 10­13 15
Natural growth rates: peak 12­13 26­27 26­27 27­29
Natural growth rates: 1995­2000 2.8 12.6 16.1 25.6
Countries (by continent) 24 17 48 56 145
Africa 0 2 11 39 52
North America 4 4 10 4 22
South America 2 1 8 1 12
Asia 0 10 18 12 40
Europe 18 0 1 0 19
Note: Underlined estimates are only approximations. `?' means that no estimation is possible.
porary contexts (Matthiessen and McCann, 1978:
62­7; Knodel, 1978; Palloni and Rafalimanana,
1999; Montgomery and Cohen, 1998; Rosero-
Bixby, 1998). This apparent confusion can be seen
in two recent overviews of transition and fertil-
ity theory published, ironically, in the same issue
of Population Studies (1996). Kirk (1996: 379) con-
cluded `If there was a single or principal cause of
fertility decline, it is reasonable to ascribe it to
falls in mortality, which was a major cause of
destabilization.'13
Yet Dirk van de Kaa (1996: 409)
countered: `But Notestein's notion that a mortal-
ity reduction would automatically lead to a
significant decline in fertility through a series of
pre-existing social mechanisms, is untenable
even though modelling confirms the plausibility
of the hypothesized effects.'
This lack of conclusive evidence has consti-
tuted a veritable attack on demographic transi-
tion theory and has ended up undermining the
importance of what can be considered to be the
most basic mechanism leading to fertility change.
It is our personal opinion that the results of much
of the research pertaining to historical contexts
have been misleading due to the demographic
indicators, the administrative context or the time
frames they have tended to use. In more recent
years, there have been a substantial number of
empirical studies pointing, often quite convinc-
ingly, to an important positive relationship
between mortality and fertility, thus underlining
its relevance for fertility change in historical con-
texts.14
In a recent article following notions orig-
inally set out by Kingsley Davis (1963), Cleland
(2001) has argued persuasively that large mortal-
ity declines are both a necessary and a sufficient
stimulus for fertility decline in historical contexts
and in the developing world. The results pre-
sented here offer strong empirical support for
Cleland's ideas: nowhere in the world, indepen-
dent of the time period, the levels of wealth or
the degree of modernisation, has fertility change
taken place without significant prior mortality
change.
The general understanding of fertility change
and of the demographic transition is often based
on the following story. Before the transition,
people preferred large families, probably because
of perceived usefulness of children either on the
family homestead, in later life as a source of
old age insurance, or for cultural reasons. Mod-
ernising elements in society then led to changes
in desired family size, with parents preferring
ever lower numbers of children. The onset of
fertility decline, at least when explained from the
standpoint of ideational change, was a chapter in
the triumph of human emancipation, rationality,
secularisation, individualism or `westernisation'
(Caldwell, 1976; Lesthaeghe, 1983).
This story is attractive, yet it tends to founder
on a reality that is present in both contemporary
and historic contexts. Families were never large
before the demographic transition. It is as though
the proponents of these theories had never read
the work of the legion of followers of Peter Laslett
who have shown convincingly that the net sib
set size in historical Europe was small before the
demographic transition (Laslett, 1972: 83). The
relatively low population growth rates prevailing
in much of the world before the demographic
transition are proof that families tended to be
small, rather than large (Wilson andAirey, 1999).15
That being the case, there is no reason for imput-
ing to these populations some sort of perceived
value for large families. The important number
was the number of surviving children, not the
number of children ever born, and that number
was never high. The exception here corresponds
to the two or three decades immediately prior to
the fertility decline in the non-European world,
when families were indeed very large. This was
an entirely exceptional situation, however, as the
low natural growth rates prior to the decline of
mortality convincingly show.
With this as our starting point, then, mortality
decline and the subsequent onset of fertility
control takes on an entirely different meaning.
Within this context, fertility control can be seen
as an attempt to maintain family size, not to
decrease it. The desire for substantially reducing
family size is only typical of a far later stage of
the demographic transition, often decades after
the onset of fertility control. Here, even though
mortality decline may end up strengthening the
`. . . belief that humans can control and modify
their environment and destinies' (Kirk, 1996: 369)
and thus contribute profoundly to the changing
of ideas so necessary for the modernisation of
society, at a more immediate and perhaps much
more powerful level, it upsets the careful
demographic-economic equilibrium so impor-
tant for the survival of families and of societies.
Nearly everywhere child mortality appears to
have declined first and fastest, followed by infant
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mortality and only later by mortality among
adults. This is a largely undisputed characteristic
of the mortality transition in Europe, although
the lack of reliable data makes it more difficult to
ascertain for countries in much of the developing
world. Where we have been able to find the data,
however, the existence of prior and more rapid
decline of child mortality appears to receive some
confirmation, thus suggesting the importance of
including both infant and child mortality when
looking at implications for fertility.16
These gains
started with inroads made against infectious
disease and were achieved, at least in the initial
stages, by means of relatively unsophisticated
and therefore inexpensive technologies. While it
is clear that mortality declined earlier in wealth-
ier countries (e.g. in Europe) than it did in poorer
ones (e.g. in Africa), it is also true that in any
given period, countries with widely divergent
levels of wealth and modernisation embarked on
a process of significant mortality decline. In other
words, the initial reductions in childhood mor-
tality appear to have had relatively little to do
with wealth and were achieved by means of rudi-
mentary and inexpensive technologies, normally
through often-informal maternal education and
improved child care.
When fertility transition set in, it also did so in
a wide constellation of social and economic con-
texts in a very short period of time. This hap-
pened in historical Europe and it has happened
in much of the developing world where a wide
variety of countries and social groups appear to
have initiated patterns of conscious fertility
control more or less simultaneously (Knodel and
van de Walle, 1986: 399­400). In other words, the
onset of fertility decline appears to have little to
do with prevailing levels of wealth, the relative
development of family planning programmes or
many other of the standard indicators normally
considered to be important for fertility limitation.
The only aspect all countries have in common is
the existence of a prior mortality change.
There is considerable evidence among the fore-
runners that fertility decline first began among
relatively older women of reproductive age.17
This has been related to parity-specific fertility
control, whereby plausibly women were making
an effort to compensate for greater numbers of
surviving children (Coale, 1986: 8­30). For those
countries whose fertility transition began more
recently, marital fertility decline appears to have
been spearheaded by couples with three or more
surviving children, with the result of a pro-
gressive reduction in the span of childbearing
(Cleland, 2001: 78). In other words, the pattern is
not entirely unlike the one holding in historical
Europe. This same pattern of change also appears
in a small sample of countries where we have
been able to generate age-specific general fertil-
ity rates during the initial years of fertility decline
where older women appear to have been the
spearheads of fertility decline, although they
were not the only age group participating in the
trend (Table 2).18
In other words, in more recent
fertility reductions, all women of reproductive
age participated, although it was among older
women that declines were greatest. Reductions in
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Table 2. Relative rates of fertility decline, by age of mother.
TFR
Onset of
Mother's age
rate of
Country decline Years <20 20­24 25­29 30­34 35­39 40­44 45­49 decline Standard
Costa Rica 1965 1960­4/1973 1.45 1.10 0.97 0.90 0.83 0.90 1.08 0.55 1.00
Peru 1975 1965­9/1980­4 1.16 1.08 1.01 1.00 0.86 0.96 0.77 0.67 1.00
Sri Lanka 1960 1953­6/1980­4 0.83 1.02 1.03 1.08 0.87 1.04 0.85 0.67 1.00
Tunisia 1965 1966/1985­9 0.58 0.95 1.15 1.20 0.96 0.72 0.54 0.57 1.00
Venezuela 1965 1980/1967 1.14 1.05 1.01 0.98 0.80 1.05 0.97 0.64 1.00
Chile 1960 1970/1960 1.35 1.18 1.01 0.83 0.84 0.93 0.71 0.68 1.00
Mexico 1970 1990/1973 1.60 1.40 1.17 0.89 0.69 0.46 0.21 0.54 1.00
Philippines 1955 1988/1979 1.02 1.02 1.06 1.00 0.94 0.83 0.95 0.79 1.00
Mean 1.13 1.09 1.05 0.98 0.85 0.87 0.77 0.64 1.00
Note: Rates of decline are relative to rate of decline of TFR (= 1.00). Demographic Yearbook: see text for further details.
general fertility rates may also have been influ-
enced by changes in nuptiality and other factors,
although conscious fertility control is likely to
have been the most important factor condition-
ing change.
Emphasising the pre-eminence of prior mor-
tality decline for any sort of conscious fertility
control is, in a sense, a self-evident proposition.
Why else, if not, would women have begun to
control their fertility when pre-transitional
natural population growth rates were never very
high (Wilson and Airey, 1999)? Ultimately this is
an economic argument because it suggests that
the onset of fertility decline was the result of the
deleterious economic effects on the well-being of
households caused by surviving children, whose
numbers increased at a far faster rate than access
to resources or economic growth (Cleland, 2001:
80­83). From this standpoint, it is difficult not to
be persuaded that the reduction of mortality was
the single universal factor involved in all long-
term fertility declines, the world over. Most of the
other factors associated with fertility reduction,
ranging from the existence of family planning
programmes to the advent of new ideas or the
role of women in society, appear to have con-
tributed to a process that was unleashed by the
earlier decline of mortality.
Divergences
Mortality decline was unquestionably a neces-
sary stimulus for fertility decline, yet it is fair to
ask whether or not it was also a sufficient one,
as Kingsley Davis (1963) and many others have
believed. If a sufficiently long view of world
events is taken into account, fertility has ended
up tumbling the world over, and so the answer
must be yes (Mason, 1997: 449). Yet the path to
fertility decline was by no means a uniform one
either, as significant differences appear when
comparing the experience of the forerunners, in
particular those in Europe, with that of much of
the rest of the world. These differences warrant
our attention as well, and can be summed up in
the following points: (1) The gap between the
mortality and fertility decline was far shorter
among the forerunners (5­10 years) than it was
for later transitions (30­40 years). (2) As a result,
natural growth rates hardly increased among the
pioneering countries (8­12 per thousand) as
opposed to the more recent transitions where it
soared to 25­29 per thousand, thus posing an
enormous obstacle for the development. (3) Once
decline set in, it was far faster in more recent tran-
sitions than it was historically. These disparities
are important ones and counsel us against ex-
cessive reductionism with regard to the global
nature of the demographic transition.
The gap between initial mortality decline and
the onset of fertility control in most countries
outside of Europe led to population growth rates
that far outpaced the capacity for economic
growth, became a serious handicap for much of
the world's development during a large part of
the second half of the twentieth century and
placed severe strain on demographic systems
everywhere (Wilson and Airey, 1999). What had
been an almost seamless reaction of fertility to
mortality among the forerunners, turned into a
prolonged period of insensitivity of fertility not
only to mortality change but apparently to nearly
every other measure implemented by national
and international authorities. Even though there
was a great deal of heterogeneity in most of the
rest of the world in the way this period was expe-
rienced and just how long it lasted, the compar-
ison with what happened among the forerunners
is unquestionably the first and most important
issue we need to address.
In order to explain this gap, at least in part,
Cleland (2001: 61­2, 82­3) recently made use
of evidence taken from social psychology
(Montgomery, 1998) suggesting that individuals
are generally not adept at perceiving demo-
graphic change or its implications at a familial or
a societal level. This inability does not defray the
real costs of raising children, which increase
inexorably as family size grows. These costs,
however, only build gradually and it may take
some time before they trigger meaningful reac-
tion. When this happens, different adaptive
strategies, such as later marriage or the migration
of children, can delay the use of birth control.
While this may have been the case for coun-
tries experiencing more recent fertility decline, in
earlier demographic transitions the adjustment
of fertility to mortality was nearly simultaneous
and it occurred despite the fact that mortality
changes were gradual when compared with
those taking place several decades later in much
of the rest of the world. The perception of demo-
The Demographic Transition Revisited 27
Copyright  2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Popul. Space Place 10, 19­41 (2004)
graphic change was sharp and accurate in those
historical populations. If not, adjustment would
never have been so smooth. In Europe people
must have been well aware of exactly how many
surviving children maximised the household
well-being and were not hesitant to do what was
necessary to make sure that goal was met. If this
was the case, it is plausible that perception took
place within the household and followed very
traditional and well-know pathways.
There is some reason to doubt the traditional
belief among demographers that parity-specific
fertility control was never present in pre-
industrial populations (Knodel and van de Walle,
1986: 390, 400­7; Coale, 1986: 10­14, 21­22;
Cleland and Wilson, 1987: 11­17), at least in most
of Europe and with the exception of certain sub-
populations (Demeny, 1968; Andorka, 1972, 1978;
Livi Bacci, 1986). Within a general context of child
hoarding (insurance) typical of high mortality
regimes, it is plausible that families with positive
experiences in child survival tended to adjust
their fertility downwards in higher age groups,
while if many children died, fertility remained
high (Preston, 1978: 9­15; Palloni and Rafali-
manana, 1999: 41­42). This situation would tend
to escape notice when using Coale and Trussel's
parameter m, designed to detect the existence of
parity based fertility control, because it is ill-
equipped to pick out the behaviour of specific
groups in society, especially when their numeri-
cal importance is fairly limited (Coale, 1971;
Coale and Trussel, 1974, 1975, 1978).
The consistently strong link between high
mortality and high fertility appearing in both
aggregate and family-level studies suggests the
existence of a relationship of this nature (Knodel,
1988: 393­441, 1978; Wrigley et al., 1997: 477­92).
Fertility was directly linked to infant mortality
(through the cessation of breastfeeding following
the death of a child), although the overall rela-
tionship could have been tied, at least in part, to
conscious forms of parity-specific fertility control
(Preston, 1978: 5­9). If we compare the age-
specific marital fertility rates from a series of pre-
industrial European populations with those of
the classic natural fertility population, the Hut-
terites between 1921 and 1930, it is apparent that,
with only the partial exception of Quebec, the
most important differences for these European
populations can be seen among women above 35
years of age (Table 3). A plausible explanation for
28 D. S. Reher
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Table 3. Age-specific marital fertility in pre-transitional populations in comparison to Hutterite marital fertility.
Age specific marital fertility rates Period 20­24 25­29 30­34 35­39 40­44 45­49
Hutterites 1921­30 550 502 447 406 222 61
Sweden 1871­80 475 390 333 266 156 25
England 1600­1824 411 366 313 246 130 21
Quebec (pioneers) XVII 460 442 416 332 162 16
France (average 4 regions) 1690­1719 439 393 343 266 150 16
Spain (average 3 places) XVII­XIX 467 401 371 260 139 25
German villages 1775­1799 455 426 376 301 155 25
Mean historical populations 451 403 359 278 149 21
Fertility rates relative to 20­24 Period 20­24 25­29 30­34 35­39 40­44 45­49
Hutterites 1921­30 1.00 0.91 0.81 0.74 0.40 0.11
Sweden 1871­80 1.00 0.82 0.70 0.56 0.33 0.05
England 1600­1824 1.00 0.89 0.76 0.60 0.32 0.05
Quebec (pioneers) XVII 1.00 0.96 0.90 0.72 0.35 0.03
France (average 4 regions) 1690­1719 1.00 0.89 0.78 0.61 0.34 0.04
Spain (average 3 places) XVII­XIX 1.00 0.86 0.79 0.56 0.30 0.05
German villages 1775­1799 1.00 0.94 0.83 0.66 0.34 0.05
Mean historical populations 1.00 0.89 0.80 0.62 0.33 0.05
Note on sources: Sweden: Sundbärg (1970: 121); England: Wrigley et al. (1997: 355); France: Henry (1978: 866); Henry (1972: 979);
Henry and Houdaille (1973: 589) and Houdaille (1976: 359); Quebec: Charbonneau (1987: 88); Spain: Pérez Garcia (1979: Table
4.19); Reher (1990: 92), and unpublished data on Aranjuez; Germany: Knodel (1988: 259).
these results is that a proportion of women in
these age groups in Europe were indeed limiting
their fertility later in reproductive life. Results
emerging from a recent research project on the
Spanish town of Aranjuez appear to indicate that
this sort of fertility limitation existed for families
with positive childhood mortality experiences,
as families with no childhood deaths for children
parities 1­3 stopped childbearing earlier and had
fewer total childbirths than families who had lost
some of their earlier children.19
More research is
required on these issues, but the results shown
here suggest that strategies of prenatal family
limitation are not to be ruled out in historical
Europe.20
By implication, should they receive
further validation, these findings would call into
question important parts of our notion of natural
fertility (Henry, 1961a, b; Knodel, 1983).
In Europe parents may have always been
willing to curtail their reproductive potential
when they saw that they had too many surviv-
ing children. There was an ideal family size in
pre-industrial Europe and it was small, even
though families were often not successful in
achieving this goal. The great destabilising force
in the reproductive equation ends up being the
decisive change in mortality at young ages.
Before the demographic transition, families with
favourable childhood mortality experiences
probably practised different forms of fertility
limitation, yet high and sharply fluctuating
childhood mortality kept the importance of this
group low. With the onset of long-term mortality
decline and its progressive stabilisation, the per-
centage of the population with favourable expe-
riences was increasing and so was the percentage
of the population exercising fertility control. In
Europe, then, the onset of fertility control would
not be a matter of implementing new behaviour
patterns so much as one of the spread of well-
known, traditional practices.
The existence of traditional prenatal fertility
control practices in pre-industrial populations
helps to explain the mechanics of the reaction of
fertility to mortality decline. Nearly simultane-
ous mortality and fertility decline among the
forerunners also suggests that in historical popu-
lations there were common underlying reasons
for both mortality and fertility change. These
make up the backbone of demographic transition
theory. We are not in a position to judge whether
or not certain types of parity-specific fertility
limitation also existed in non-European pre-
industrial societies. Even so, the lack of simul-
taneity suggests that traditional fertility
constraints were not nearly so effective among
them, and that the underlying reasons diverge
from those holding in historical Europe. Delayed
perceptions of changing mortality may explain
part of this process, but clearly not all of it.
When comparing the demographic transitions
in historical and in contemporary populations, it
is important to understand that the original
decline of mortality and fertility among the fore-
runners, dating from the latter part of the nine-
teenth and the initial years of the twentieth
century, took place in a very different historical
context than in the countries where mortality
decline gathered intensity during the central
decades of the twentieth century (1930­1960).
The importance of scientific progress, medicine
and especially that of international agency for the
decline of mortality was quite different at mid-
century than it was 50­70 years earlier. The
original European mortality transformation was
mainly the result of improved maternal educa-
tion with respect to child-bearing and rearing
practices, improving nutritional status and in-
cipient public health measures spearheaded by
governments at the behest of the medical and
scientific establishment (Woods and Shelton,
1997; Reher, 2001). Many factors played an
important role in this transformation. Changes
in child feeding practices, the importance of per-
sonal and public hygiene, the resistance to certain
diseases (whose prevalence, especially in the case
of respiratory diseases, may well have increased
during the period) because of improved nutri-
tional levels, and more adequate care of sick
children were all of crucial importance. Public
health measures designed to clean up towns, im-
prove housing conditions, purify water supplies
and institutionalise certain types of illness also
played a key role. It was a period when the med-
icalisation of life and health was only in its in-
cipient stage, and the effect of medicine on
health was largely indirect. Mortality decline was
achieved with remarkably rudimentary tech-
nologies yet it was dramatic, with life expectancy
rising by as much as 6 or 7 years per decade, and
childhood mortality being reduced by over half
in as few as two or three decades. In sum, these
changes can be attributed to modernising ele-
ments present in these societies.
The Demographic Transition Revisited 29
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The major difference with the next wave of
mortality decline, starting in the third and fourth
decades of the twentieth century, is the role
played by international agency, formal medicine
and active governmental intervention in that
process. The use of sulphonamides and antibi-
otics, large-scale immunisation programmes and
the diffusion of medical technologies through
health-care systems point to the predominant
role of scientific research, international organisa-
tions and government in promoting the health
of young children (Caldwell, 1986: 194­200). The
`classic' reasons for the decline of mortality
among the forerunners of the demographic tran-
sition were less relevant. Instead of stemming
from changes inherent in the transformation of
society, the improvements in infant and child
health were more the product of measures
designed elsewhere, and aggressively and suc-
cessfully promoted by governments (Riley, 2001:
104­6). In Europe and in countries with strongly
Europeanised societies it had been basically an
autochthonous process, the result of their devel-
opment during the nineteenth and early twenti-
eth centuries, whereas in much of the rest of the
world it was much less so. Despite notable excep-
tions, dramatic health improvements, far more
pronounced than among the forerunners, often
began in the absence of the sort of profound
social transformation taking place in Europe
(Caldwell, 1986).
The original context of fertility decline in
Europe was in part the result of that same process
of modernisation that brought about improve-
ments in mortality. They were two aspects of a
deep social and ideational transformation that
involved the industrialisation of society; the
ascendance of salaried labour over inherited
wealth; rapid urbanisation; dramatic increases in
educational levels, especially of women; massive
overseas and rural-to-urban migration flows; the
increasing role of public institutions, especially
governments, for individual life; the emergence
of powerful secular social institutions (labour
unions, for example): and, of course, the incipi-
ent democratisation of public life. These factors
help explain both the reduction of mortality and
the decline of fertility. Yet most of them were of
relatively little significance when mortality first
began to diminish in most of the countries expe-
riencing more recent demographic transitions.
The appropriate social context existed among the
forerunners at the onset of the demographic tran-
sition, but not elsewhere. This helps explain why
fertility ended up being less responsive to the
challenges presented by improvements in child
survival.
Beyond this, however, in much of the world
mothers appear to have been less sensitive to
the potentially negative effects of increasing
numbers of surviving children than they were
among the forerunners, or at least they were not
sensitive in the same way.21
For most of the fol-
lowers and the trailers, the period of maximum
population growth took place between 1945
and 1970 when economic growth was also fairly
strong and opportunities for migration were
abundant. These migratory movements were
directed mainly towards the large cities, giving
rise to a period of intense urbanisation and the
breakneck growth of extremely large urban areas.
If women were able to send their `excess' children
to the towns at fairly young ages or put them to
work locally, the economic effects of increasing
numbers of surviving children tended to be mit-
igated. Other social and culturally-determined
mechanisms tending to limit the implications of
increasing numbers of children also existed
(Mason, 1997: 447­52; 2001; Skinner, 1997). Post-
natal responses to excess fertility were common
in all societies and they could delay the onset
of fertility control within marriage (Davis, 1963).
In sum, the relatively low cost of unwanted fer-
tility and the lags of individual perception of
mortality declines helped cushion the effects of
rapidly increasing child survival levels (Bhat,
1998).
Mason (1997: 451­2) has explained the greater
European readiness to use prenatal methods of
fertility limitation in terms of a more limited
range of morally acceptable forms of postnatal
family limitation than elsewhere. While this may
be the case, it does not fully solve the conundrum
of why in Europe prenatal controls were so
readily adopted in the face of relatively moder-
ate improvements in child survival, when in
much of the rest of the world far more dramatic
increases in survivorship were not met with in
a similar way until many decades after initial
improvements in survival. Cultural differences
regarding the role of the family and the economic
autonomy of conjugal family units may have
30 D. S. Reher
Copyright  2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Popul. Space Place 10, 19­41 (2004)
also played an important role. It is interesting to
note that all of the forerunners, practically without
exception, were countries characterised histori-
cally by relatively late and restricted marriage
patterns, as opposed to those where the gap
between mortality and fertility decline was sub-
stantial, characterised by early and universal
nuptiality, by joint family, clan and/or tribal-
based forms of social organisation, or by signifi-
cant proportions of fertility taking place outside
of marriage. In none of these societies did mar-
riage have the same range of meaning as it did in
historical Europe or, for that matter, among
the non-European but very `Europeanised'
forerunners.
For Malthus, populations that held their fertil-
ity in check by means of restricted nuptiality
were examples of `moral restraint'. For him,
moral restraint formed a structural part of
people's priorities and helped assure economic
well-being further on in life. The `European mar-
riage pattern', characterised by relatively late and
restricted nuptiality, was unique in the world
(Hajnal, 1965, 1982). It was determined basically
by the belief that a marriage could not take place
unless a couple had the wherewithal to be eco-
nomically independent (Smith, 1981: 596­602,
613­18). It is unquestionable that in Europe mar-
riage patterns were strongly determined by both
collective and individual economic realities. This
was largely because these realities formed the
basis of household decision-making. This led to
relatively late and restricted marriage in many
parts of Europe and helps explain many of the
other economic and social differences separating
historical Europe from much of the rest of the
world.
There is also abundant evidence that in histor-
ical Europe there was a long tradition, very much
embedded in people's awareness, of limiting fer-
tility for the purposes of assuring economic well-
being. Access to marriage is one example of this.
There is also proof that the temporary limitation
of fertility, either in times of duress or for reasons
of seasonal labour practices or religious obliga-
tions, was practiced by many sectors of society.
The increase in the incidence of child abandon-
ment during times of economic hardship can be
considered another type of economically moti-
vated reproductive strategy (Reher, 1990: 143­8).
The persistently positive relationship between
economic fluctuations and fertility, both in the
short run (Lee, 1981; Galloway, 1988; Bengtsson
and Reher, 1998) and in the medium run (Wrigley
and Schofield, 1981: 402­35; Lee, 1985; Reher
and Ortega-Osona, 2000), proof positive of the
existence of the preventive check predicted by
Malthus, was due ­ at least in part ­ to conscious
attempts by people to limit fertility, either within
marriage, through it or by other means.22
Parity-
specific fertility control was another dimension
of family limitation that may well have been
used among certain low-mortality population
subgroups.
The point here is that in historical Europe the
links between economic conditions and repro-
duction had always been strong at a household
level, and these societies were no strangers to
certain forms of family limitation in the past.
Given the much higher prevailing levels of mor-
tality in many countries outside of Europe, the
strictly demographic reasons for family forma-
tion probably took precedence over the economic
ones. Among the forerunners, on the other hand,
where pre-transitional mortality was much
lower, it was relatively easy to meet reproductive
goals, thus enabling later and more restricted
marriage and overwhelmingly economic consid-
erations to become normative behaviour for
young couples. In other societies, the necessary
balance between population and resources
tended to be achieved within the larger kin group
or the tribe or at a more general societal level,
rather than directly through the conjugal family
group, as it was, by and large, in Europe. In this
way, the penalty for individual reproductive
excess, exacerbated during the initial phases of
the demographic transition by rapidly declining
mortality, was less directly felt by mothers and
their immediate families than it was among the
forerunners. It is an example of how culturally-
induced behavioural patterns within a context
of traditionally high mortality and limited
resources helped cushion the inexorable eco-
nomic implications of increasing numbers of
surviving children.
Afinal issue warrants our attention. When con-
sidering the different ways fertility reacted to
initial mortality declines, it is important to bear
in mind that the nature of contraception differed
sharply in earlier and later fertility transitions.
Among the forerunners, family limitation was
The Demographic Transition Revisited 31
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achieved primarily through abstinence or coitus
interruptus, both of which were traditional, non-
invasive methods of prenatal fertility control.
Withdrawal may not have been terribly efficient,
but both methods were well known and had been
widely used by European populations to limit
fertility. For more recent transitions, artificial con-
traception, sterilisation or abortion were the stan-
dard methods of birth control. All of them were
and are invasive and many were met with con-
siderable apprehension (Bogue, 1983). Besides,
some of them involved a certain measure of daily
accounting, a concept entirely foreign to many
traditional societies. While efficient, their use
required a basic change in values, considerable
education or an overwhelming need. Succinctly
stated, the new methods of contraception had a
learning curve, whereas the traditional ones in
Europe did not. This helps explain why it took so
many years for family planning programmes to
become truly effective. It also helps us under-
stand why the first groups to implement fertility
control in much of the world were educated
city-dwellers.
After a gap of between 30 and 40 years,
however, fertility decline finally set in. Significant
social and educational changes had taken place
during that period and in many ways, by the
1960s or 1970s, these societies were much more
modern than they had been when mortality first
began its fall. Ultimately, the fertility transition
was unimaginable without both a prior decline
of mortality and a profound social and cultural
transformation. The gap suggests that, unlike
Europe where the mothers who participated in
the initial decline of mortality were also the ones
initiating fertility limitation later in life, fertility
control effectively skipped a generation. In other
words, the women who first began controlling
their fertility were probably those girls who had
grown up in crowded households with decreas-
ing living standards and who went on to experi-
ence lower than expected childhood mortality
during the early part of their own reproduc-
tive lives. Even though fertility reduction was
strongest among older age groups, thus indicat-
ing parity-specific limitation, it is clear that
women of all ages participated in spreading birth
control. The availability of contraceptive mea-
sures made little difference to women until they
felt the need to use them and were ready to do
so. But when that happened, these were used
massively, efficiently limiting family size
(Caldwell, 2001). The potent combination of
pent-up demand plus the availability of effective
birth control techniques helps explain why fer-
tility decline has been so precipitous in those
nations, much more so than among the pioneers
of conscious fertility control.
As growing numbers of people were control-
ling their reproductive practices, the diffusion of
their successful behaviour patterns (with fewer
children born and fewer to die) to other sectors
of society was probably a major reason why the
demographic transition took hold so quickly
(Carlsson, 1966; Cleland and Wilson, 1987;
Watkins, 1990; Pollack and Watkins, 1993;
Bongaarts and Watkins, 1996). Here social net-
works may have been a relevant vehicle for this
process, although we know less than we should
on this point. In both historical and contempo-
rary contexts we can identify factors facilitating
(or hindering) the diffusion of successful repro-
ductive practices (language, education, geogra-
phy, national economies, social structures, etc.),
although showing empirically the specific ways
they worked is a much more difficult proposition
(Livi Bacci, 1993: 22­3). The diffusion of success-
ful strategies of childcare and child-bearing was
unquestionably a characteristic of all demo-
graphic transitions, past and present.
From a historical perspective, the gap between
mortality and fertility decline does not seem to
be so terribly long, although middle-term demo-
graphic and economic consequences of this delay
were enormous. It led to extremely rapid demo-
graphic growth, created a significant oversupply
of labour in much of the world, and proved to be
an important hindrance for the economic devel-
opment of these countries during much of the
second half of the twentieth century.
DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITIONS AND THEIR
IMPLICATIONS FOR MODERN SOCIETIES
The process of demographic transition is not
yet complete. In much of the world, it is just
entering its second phase, with ever-more
rapid declines in both mortality and fertility.
Even among its forerunners, population changes
implicit in the dynamics of all demographic tran-
sitions are still far from fully developed. By and
large, these changes are affecting population age
structures and the make-up of the labour force
32 D. S. Reher
Copyright  2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Popul. Space Place 10, 19­41 (2004)
and will continue to do so in the future. The
developing world has much to learn from the
experiences of the early participants in the demo-
graphic transition, because they too will undergo
similar changes in future decades.
A universal implication of all demographic
transitions is a generalised process of ageing.
Reductions in fertility initially, together with the
increasing length of life among people of older
ages at subsequent stages, lead to top-heavy
population age structures and to ever-increasing
proportions of people's life spent in what are
considered `elderly' age groups. In time, fertility
decline also leads to a decrease in the supply of
labour, although this process may be delayed as
long as the size of successive cohorts continues
to increase. This is no longer the case in Europe,
which is facing a prolonged period of extremely
rapid ageing.
Fertility is the key to this process. Among the
forerunners, decades of moderate fertility reduc-
tion leading to a gradual ageing of society came
to a temporary halt in the 1950s and 1960s during
the baby boom, when decline stopped and, in
some areas, fertility even underwent important
increases. Afterwards, decline set in once again,
but this time it was far faster than before in rela-
tive terms and has led, over the past 25 years in
most European countries, to total fertility rates
far below replacement levels and much lower
than they ever were in the past. Some scholars
have called this process the `second demographic
transition' (van de Kaa, 1987), although it can be
argued that it is no more than a new stage of the
general process of demographic transition. As a
result, severe labour shortages, extremely rapid
population ageing, intense migratory pressure,
and difficulties in maintaining pensions and
other systems of social welfare loom as major
social and economic challenges facing many of
the forerunners.
Will this happen in the rest of the world? Is it
inherent in the very notion of demographic tran-
sition? Whereas we can have some fairly clear
ideas about the plausible trends in mortality, the
future course of fertility is nearly impossible to
know. Judging from the dramatic reductions in
fertility in a number of the countries we have
classified as followers and trailers, however, we
might wonder whether here, too, in the not-too-
distant future fertility will fall below replacement
levels. While this proposition may seem at first
glance to be unreasonable, it did happen in
Europe, and in many developing countries fertil-
ity is now below the levels shown in Europe
during the 1960s.23
There is nothing at all to
suggest that this will not come to pass elsewhere
in the world and lead to the challenges of popu-
lation ageing and eventually diminishing sup-
plies of available labour if intense fertility decline
continues. The data presented in Table 4 suggest
that reductions in the number of births and
cohort size are already a reality for much of the
world, one that will make itself felt for the supply
of labour in the not-so-distant future. In this
sense, the speed with which fertility and mortal-
ity have declined among many of the followers
and trailers has led to an important reduction in
the lags between them and the forerunners. For
them, the process of ageing, still only in its incip-
ient stages, will be far faster than among the pio-
neers of the demographic transition.
In retrospect, the pace of the demographic
transition among the forerunners was a leisurely
The Demographic Transition Revisited 33
Copyright  2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Popul. Space Place 10, 19­41 (2004)
Table 4. Incipient ageing in world populations (by continent).
Population age structure indicators
Continent Total population % 0­4/10­14 0­4/15­19 0­4/20­24
Africa 561,387,546 (10.4) 1.32 1.56 1.87
North America 454,611,744 (8.4) 1.03 1.07 1.15
South America 316,707,021 (5.9) 0.98 1.03 1.16
Asia 3,302,599,883 (61.3) 0.98 1.16 1.19
Europe 725,210,534 (13.5) 0.82 0.82 0.79
Oceania 27,254,891 (0.5) 1.12 1.16 1.10
World 5,387,771,619 (100.0) 1.02 1.16 1.21
Note: Based on census data and population estimates from the 1990s, normally around 1995 (Demographic Yearbook).
one, giving rise to a gradual process of ageing
and leading to nearly a century of relatively low
and decreasing population dependency ratios.
These were certainly not the only advantages
these societies had at their disposal, but unques-
tionably they helped fuel a century of enormous
economic growth, rising living standards and a
profound transformation of society (Williamson,
1997, 1998). Population and human capital have
been powerful fellow travellers for economic
growth and social modernisation over much of
the twentieth century among most of the forerun-
ners. Demographic regimes became more effi-
cient, thus liberating the human capital necessary
to transform society (Dyson, 2001). For those
countries where this did not happen, or only hap-
pened partially, it is akin to a historic opportu-
nity lost, normally due to institutional, social or
political reasons.
The breakneck pace of the demographic tran-
sition among the countries who initiated their
own transformations more recently may not
leave these countries with this same sort of ample
margin for economic growth and social transfor-
mation. For them, a situation of explosive popu-
lation growth with extremely young populations
may become one of rapidly ageing populations
and diminishing supplies of labour in very rapid
succession. This is not a matter of opinion or an
educated guess, but rather the most likely sce-
nario for the future in much of the world. The
window of opportunity for the demographic
transition contributing to the process of social
and economic modernisation in many countries
will be a small one indeed.
The demographic realities facing the devel-
oped countries are no longer bright, as popula-
tion ceases to be a positive factor for the process
of economic growth and social change, and
begins to exert an increasingly negative influ-
ence. In much of the rest of the world, demo-
graphic pressures are decreasing and prospects
are brightening, although this improvement
might only be temporary. Yet, the historical
advantages of the pioneering countries once
again will be present, as in the coming years they
will be able to make use of the excess labour sup-
plies of developing countries to shore up their
own labour markets. Even though migration can
often be socially problematic, it is unquestion-
ably an economically expedient solution for at
least part of the labour shortages these countries
are beginning to face. This solution, however, is
only a temporary one because in a matter of a
very few decades, countries with abundant
labour may begin suffering labour shortages of
their own. Unless things change dramatically,
however, for these countries there will be no
neighbouring countries with excess labour sup-
plies to turn to when they need them, although
this need will likely be blunted and delayed by
the entry en masse of women into the labour
market, much as began to happen among
the developed countries during the past half
century.
Ultimately this brings us full swing back to the
issue of fertility. Much more so than for migra-
tion, the future course of fertility will help shape
the world our children and grandchildren will
live in during the central decades of the twenty-
first century. Here the key question facing us is
whether or not the extremely low fertility rates
so evident in Europe over the past two or three
decades are inherent to the demographic transi-
tion or not. Everywhere the demographic transi-
tion basically removed reproductive behaviour
from the realm of social control and placed it
within the purview of individual choice
(Lesthaeghe, 1980). Individual choice is, of
course, also subject to the constraints of social
control, although not in the same way in post-
transitional societies. Does this lead necessarily
to the extremely low fertility evident today in
Europe, and will it do so elsewhere in the world?
At this stage, we do not know the answer to
either of these questions. If it does, however, then
the problems facing the world as ever-smaller
cohorts of women begin reaching reproductive
age will make past demographic challenges and
issues pale by comparison.
NOTES
(1) An earlier version of this paper was given at the
recent meeting on The History of World Population
in the Second Millennium organised by the IUSSP
Historical Demography Committee and held
in Florence, Italy (June 2001), as well as the
CAMPOP Population History Seminar (Cam-
bridge, UK) and at the University of Barcelona
(Spain). The criticisms and suggestions of many
34 D. S. Reher
Copyright  2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Popul. Space Place 10, 19­41 (2004)
colleagues on earlier versions of this paper, in par-
ticular those of Patrick Galloway and Fernando
González-Quiones, have been most helpful in
preparing this paper.
(2) By century's end, significant fertility decline had
commenced in all but 12 of the 145 nations used
in our sample.
(3) Many of these series are compiled in Mitchell's
International Historical Statistics (1998) and pro-
vide many of the historical estimates of vital
rates used in this paper. Corresponding series for
Latin America contained in Collver (1965) have
also been used. Where discrepancies have arisen,
we have chosen those which seemed to be most
reasonable.
(4) Taking Angola as an example, the yearly crude
birth rates for the 1950­1959 decade are: 6.2, 7.5,
6.8, 34.8, 6.4, 6.1, 5.8, 6.5, 32.2 and 6.5. In cases
such as these, only the estimates for 1953 and 1958
(both based on Population Division estimates)
have been used.
(5) For 1995­99, data taken from the Demographic
Yearbook corresponding to 1998 have been used. It
is disappointing to note that the Demographic Year-
book contains no data for Taiwan. Fortunately
Taiwan has a fairly long historical time series
lasting nearly to the present which has been most
useful for this paper.
(6) Countries where decline was not yet visible in the
most recent data were classified among the late-
comers and arbitrarily given the date of 2000 for
the onset of decline.
(7) This procedure is problematic when the number
of countries making up a given category changes
suddenly, especially around 1950. This is espe-
cially the case with the trailers, where very few
countries have data before 1950 and several do
afterwards.
(8) In certain countries, especially in North America
(Cuba, Jamaica, the US, etc.), the effects of a very
strong `baby boom' brings fertility back up to near
historical levels during the 1950s and 1960s, often
decades after the fertility transition had set in.
These peaks owing to the `baby boom' have
been ignored when dating the onset of fertility
decline.
(9) Pre-transition CBRs were near or above 40 per
thousand in America and closer to 33 per thou-
sand in Europe. See Appendix Figure A.
(10) Within the European forerunners themselves, there
were also important differences, with the initial
levels of fertility and mortality being considerably
lower in northern Europe than in southern and
especially in eastern Europe. The onset of fertility
decline was slightly later in southern and much
later in eastern Europe than in the northern
reaches of the continent. Despite their pioneering
role, these countries showed considerable hetero-
geneity, more so than any other group. On this
point, see Appendix Figure B.
(11) The jump in birth and death rates around 1950
was due to the incorporation of several new coun-
tries into the group sample at that time.
(12) For the latecomers, there are practically no time
series dating from before the 1950s. For this
reason, in Fig. 2 we projected backwards from
1950 the plausible birth and death rates needed to
establish rates of natural increase similar to the
other groups.
(13) See also: `It is tempting to suggest that it was the
decline of mortality which led to the disequilib-
rium that triggered not only the fertility transi-
tion, but more than any else reduced the shackles
of fatalism which lay behind secularisation, the
rise of the modern economy, and even the knowl-
edge explosion' (Kirk, 1996: 386).
(14) In a careful review of different models of fertility
change in historical contexts, Galloway et al.
(1998a) found that changes in IMRs were a major
predictor of fertility change in European coun-
tries. In their empirical studies of Prussia, these
same authors found similar results (Galloway et
al., 1994, 1998b). For an overview along these lines
of mortality and fertility interactions during the
European demographic transition, see Reher
(1999). One of the strongest statements support-
ing the mortality­fertility link before and during
the demographic transition can be found in
Chesnais (1986: 11­12, 53­92).
(15) In any given pretransitional population, there
would be families of many different sizes, but on
average they would be small.
(16) During an initial period of mortality decline
(lasting approximately a decade) in Costa Rica,
infant mortality declined 11% more than crude
death rates (CDRs) and child mortality (1­4) did
so 39% more, and in Sri Lanka IMRs did so 8%
more and child mortality 31% more. For an
overview of historical contexts, see Reher (1999:
13, 29­30).
(17) Using Swedish national statistics for marital
fertility, for example, between 1876­80 and
1896­1900, marital fertility among women aged
20­29 declined by about 3­4%, among women
aged 30­39 by about 12%, and among women
aged 40­49 by about 24%; see Sundbärg (1970;
Table 41, p. 121).
(18) In this table, the rates of decline at different ages
are relative to the rate of decline of the TFR for
any given society.
(19) These results refer to the decades immediately
prior to the onset of the transition itself (circa 1905
The Demographic Transition Revisited 35
Copyright  2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Popul. Space Place 10, 19­41 (2004)
for period measures). For cohort marital fertility
trajectories completed between 1890 and 1910, we
divided a sizable sample of families with multi-
ple births (final parities 4 and higher) into two cat-
egories: `successful families' [with no childhood
deaths for parities 1­3] (206 families) and `unsuc-
cessful families' [where deaths in childhood had
taken place] (527 families). Our results show that
age at last birth was one year earlier for successful
than for unsuccessful families (36.9  38.0) and
final parities were lower (6.1  7.0). In a related
study, it has also been shown that nearly a quarter
of mothers ceased childbearing at 35 years of
age or younger, and thus may well have been
controlling their fertility (Sanz-Gimeno and
González-Quiones, 2001).
(20) For a partially divergent view on the existence of
parity-specific fertility control in certain historical
populations, see Van Bavel (2003).
(21) Here important differences existed by social
group, economic sector or habitat. Even so, the
gap between mortality and fertility decline would
seldom have been as short as it was in most social
groups among the forerunners.
(22) A positive short-run relationship between eco-
nomic fluctuations and fertility has also been
found in a number of Latin American countries
(Palloni et al., 1996).
(23) A few examples will suffice to show this. In the
1950s and early 1960s, in Brazil total fertility rates
were above 6.1 and in the mid 1990s they were
2.5; in Tunisia during the same period, fertility
rates went from 7.2 to 2.8, in Sri Lanka from 5.7
to 2.3, and in Mexico from 6.8 to 3.2. In Europe
during the 1960s, total fertility rates in many
countries were well above 2.5.
36 D. S. Reher
Copyright  2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Popul. Space Place 10, 19­41 (2004)
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
1850-54
1870-74
1890-94
1910-14
1930-34
1950-54
1970-74
1990-94
CBR
CDR
NatGr
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
1850-54
1870-74
1890-94
1910-14
1930-34
1950-54
1970-74
1990-94
CBR
CDR
NatGr
Europe
America
Figure A. Demographic transition among the forerunners.
APPENDIX
The Demographic Transition Revisited 37
Copyright  2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Popul. Space Place 10, 19­41 (2004)
Onset of
Initial fertility
Category Country Continent data decline
Forerunners
Canada North America 1900­04 1915
Cuba North America 1900­04 1920
United States North America 1905­09 1925
Jamaica North America 1875­79 1925
Argentina South America 1860­64 1910
Uruguay South America 1880­84 1890
Austria Europe 1900­04 1915
Belgium Europe 1850­04 1905
Bulgaria Europe 1890­94 1925
Denmark Europe 1850­54 1910
England and Europe 1850­54 1910
Wales
Finland Europe 1850­54 1915
France Europe 1850­54 1900
Germany Europe 1850­54 1900
Hungary Europe 1860­64 1890
Italy Europe 1900­04 1925
Netherlands Europe 1900­04 1910
Norway Europe 1850­54 1905
Portugal Europe 1885­89 1925
Romania Europe 1915­19 1935
Scotland Europe 1855­59 1905
Spain Europe 1875­79 1910
Sweden Europe 1850­54 1865
Switzerland Europe 1870­74 1910
Followers
Mauritius Africa 1755­79 1960
Reunion Africa 1945­49 1955
Onset of
Initial fertility
Category Country Continent data decline
Antigua North America 1945­49 1960
Barbados North America 1910­14 1955
Martinique North America 1945­49 1960
Puerto Rico North America 1910­14 1950
Chile South America 1850­54 1960
Brunei Asia 1945­49 1960
India Asia 1950­54 1960
Israel Asia 1925­29 1955
Japan Asia 1870­74 1950
Korea Asia 1950­54 1960
(Republic)
Phillipines Asia 1950­54 1955
Qatar Asia 1950­54 1955
Singapore Asia 1925­29 1955
Sri Lanka Asia 1850­54 1960
Taiwan Asia 1905­09 1955
Trailers
Algeria Africa 1950­54 1975
Botswana Africa 1950­54 1975
Egypt Africa 1915­19 1965
Morocco Africa 1950­54 1965
Seychelles Africa 1945­49 1965
South Africa Africa 1950­54 1975
Swaziland Africa 1950­54 1975
Tunisia Africa 1950­54 1965
Tanzania Africa 1950­54 1975
Western Africa 1950­54 1975
Sahara
Zimbabwe Africa 1950­54 1970
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
1850-541870-741890-941910-141930-341950-541970-741990-94
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
1850-541870-741890-941910-141930-341950-541970-741990-94
CBR
CDR
NatGr
­10
0
10
20
30
40
50
1850-541870-741890-941910-141930-341950-541970-741990-94
Southern Europe
Northern Europe Eastern Europe
Figure B. Demographic transition among European forerunners.
Table A. Countries by category and date of initial data.
38 D. S. Reher
Copyright  2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Popul. Space Place 10, 19­41 (2004)
Onset of
Initial fertility
Category Country Continent data decline
Bahamas North America 1945­49 1965
Belize North America 1945­49 1965
Bermuda North America 1945­49 1965
Cayman North America 1945­49 1965
Islands
Costa Rica North America 1900­04 1965
Dominican North America 1950­54 1965
Republic
El Salvador North America 1900­04 1965
Mexico North America 1895­99 1970
Panama North America 1900­04 1970
Trinidad and North America 1880­84 1965
Tobago
Bolivia South America 1950­54 1975
Brazil South America 1950­54 1965
Colombia South America 1900­04 1965
Ecuador South America 1915­19 1970
Guyana South America 1890­94 1965
Peru South America 1945­49 1975
Surinam South America 1945­49 1965
Venezuela South America 1885­89 1965
Armenia Asia 1950­54 1965
Azerbaijan Asia 1950­54 1965
Bahrain Asia 1950­54 1970
China Asia 1950­54 1970
Georgia Asia 1950­54 1965
Indonesia Asia 1950­54 1970
Iraq Asia 1950­54 1975
Jordan Asia 1950­54 1975
Korea Asia 1950­54 1970
(People's
Republic)
Kuwait Asia 1950­54 1975
Kyrgyzstan Asia 1950­54 1965
Lebanon Asia 1950­54 1965
Malaysia Asia 1940­44 1965
Mongolia Asia 1950­54 1975
Myanmar Asia 1950­54 1975
Thailand Asia 1950­54 1965
Turkmenistan Asia 1950­54 1965
Uzbekistan Asia 1950­54 1965
Albania Europe 1950­54 1965
Latecomers
Angola Africa 1950­54 1995
Benin Africa 1950­54 1985
Burkina Faso Africa 1950­54 2000
Burundi Africa 1950­54 1995
Cameroon Africa 1950­54 1985
Central Africa 1950­54 1990
African
Republic
Chad Africa 1950­54 2000
Onset of
Initial fertility
Category Country Continent data decline
Comoros Africa 1950­54 1990
Congo Africa 1950­54 2000
Congo (Dem. Africa 1950­54 2000
Republic)
Djibouti Africa 1950­54 1985
Eritrea Africa 1950­54 1990
Ethiopia Africa 1950­54 1990
Gabon Africa 1950­54 2000
Gambia Africa 1950­54 1985
Ghana Africa 1950­54 1985
Guinea Africa 1950­54 1995
Guinea Africa 1950­54 2000
Bissau
Ivory Coast Africa 1950­54 1985
Kenya Africa 1950­54 1980
Lesotho Africa 1950­54 1985
Liberia Africa 1950­54 1995
Libya Africa 1950­54 1980
Madagascar Africa 1950­54 1990
Malawi Africa 1950­54 1980
Mali Africa 1950­54 1995
Mauritania Africa 1950­54 1980
Mozambique Africa 1950­54 2000
Namibia Africa 1950­54 1990
Niger Africa 1950­54 1985
Nigeria Africa 1950­54 1995
Rwanda Africa 1950­54 1995
Senegal Africa 1950­54 1980
Sierra Leone Africa 1950­54 2000
Somalia Africa 1950­54 2000
Sudan Africa 1950­54 1980
Togo Africa 1950­54 1995
Uganda Africa 1945­49 2000
Zambia Africa 1950­54 1980
Guatemala North America 1900­04 1985
Haiti North America 1950­54 1985
Honduras North America 1910­14 1985
Nicaragua North America 1950­54 1985
Paraguay South America 1950­54 1985
Afghanistan Asia 1950­54 2000
Bangladesh Asia 1950­54 1980
Bhutan Asia 1950­54 1995
Cambodia Asia 1950­54 1990
Iran Asia 1950­54 1985
Lao People's Asia 1950­54 1995
Republic
Nepal Asia 1950­54 1995
Oman Asia 1950­54 1995
Saudi Arabia Asia 1950­54 1980
Syria Asia 1950­54 1985
Vietnam Asia 1950­54 1980
Yemen Asia 1950­54 2000
Table A. Continued
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