On Wed, 2007-08-08 at 11:00 +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> Notice that France largely profits from high birth rate in the black

this sounds like the mythical nonsense of neo-con eurabia. while france
does not collect figures on race and religion, assuming a 10% non-white
population [1], and assuming that the white french population has the
same fertility rate as white germans, the difference in ratios between
germany's 1.39 and france's 2.0 would have to be explained by non-white
french women having 7.5 children each, on average.

for reference, german fertility by ethnicity is 1.39 for whites and 2.4
for turks [2]. in fact, the same source notes that french-born french
fertility (which would include some non-whites) is 1.7, compared to 2.6
for french women born in algeria.

if you like, the link i suggested, that low fertility is a result of
social support for women not keeping up with opportunities for women
could be applied just to native-borns (to control for opportunities for
women) - and you still see (in the same source) the large difference
between germany, italy, spain on the one hand, and france, sweden,
netherlands and england on the other.

note that in england, and norway, unlike france, some "non-white"
populations have much higher fertility - e.g. in 1996, women born in
pakistan and bangladesh living in england had 4.9 children vs 1.7 for
those born in england. in 1998 in norway it was 5.2 for somali-born
women and 1.7 for native-born norwegians. this could be explained by
these women not having the opportunities available to the native
population.

btw, my argument on the relationship between social support for women's
opportunities and fertility is hardly original. a paper from the
wonderfully titled Centre for Household, Income, Labour and Demographic
Economics (CHILD) makes the same point, with lots of data [3].

-rishab

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_France
2. http://paa2007.princeton.edu/download.aspx?submissionId=70869
3. http://iserwww.essex.ac.uk/epunet/2003/docs/pdf/papers/pronzato.pdf


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