On the impossibility of inferring cohort fertility measures from period fertility measures

A particularly important struggle faced by demographic analysts is, how to arrive at statements about family formation processes from a cohort perspective from data that are essentially collected on an annual basis. The present paper is concerned with this struggle, mostly restricted to the case of fertility. The central question investigated here is: given observed period data, what can we conclude about the completed family size of real women? I review several existing methods to infer cohort fertility from period fertility measures. The conclusion is that, for each method, its justifiability can be verified only empirically: by looking at cohort fertility directly. To illustrate how this can be done, the paper analyses fertility data from a cohort perspective for two countries, Italy and the Netherlands.cohort fertility, demographic transition, fertility, Italy, Netherlands, period adjustment, tempo and quantum, total fertility rate

Education at home: the age-specific pattern of migration between the Netherlands and the former Dutch East Indies around 1930

The 1930 population census of the former Dutch East Indies (currently Indonesia) shows for the European population a striking shortage in the age range 10-20. This paper deals with the possible causes of this constriction in the age structure, in particular, the phenomenon of European children attending secondary education in the Netherlands. Using sample data from the city of The Hague, it is estimated that the proportion of students in the Netherlands born in the Dutch Indies was about 3 per cent, implying than the teenager gap in the Dutch Indies was for about half due to a cohort effect and for the other half due to the ‘education at home’ effect.age structure, age/aging, census, colonial times, Dutch East Indies, education, Europe, Europeans, Indonesia, migration, secondary education