Fertility, Time and Conflict

Gunnar Thorvaldsen, UiT - Arctic University of Norway

Fertility variations over time is an important topic, as Eilert Sundt showed already in the mid-19th century with his theory of generational waves. Cf review of On marriage in Norway at https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1525/ae.1982.9.3.02a00250. Both annual and monthly fluctuations are important parts of population dynamics, and provide much insight if combined with other variables on the individual and group levels and the historical development. In the 20th century, it became usual to include birth dates in the population censuses, for instance for Norway from 1910. Month of birth from this census is a variable at nappdata.org, and for some countries, such as Romania and Vietnam these have been preserved in the IPUMS microdata versions, cf https://international.ipums.org/international-action/variables/group?id=core. Date of birth is now available in a separate database for the whole population of Norway in the 1950 census, together with other variables from an increasing part of the enumeration. By subtraction is is easy to compute the month of procreation, and for instance it comes as no big surprise that the lowest number of women got pregnant in April 1940, after the German attack on the ninth. The paper will summarize the connection between birth numbers, Sundtian generational waves and other demographic and historical developments.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 229. Various aspects of Fertility