Comparative analysis of completed parity distributions: a global WFS perspective

This paper studies completed parity distributions for all the industrialized and developing countries that participated in the World Fertility Survey. This is done by means of a table based on parity calculated for all ever-married women above age 40 by educational and residential subcategories. The information is also used to compare mean family and mean sibship sizes and to study changes in the concentration of reproduction independent of the level of fertility. The cross- section of countries considered implies that, as fertility declines, the transition from high to low fertility is associated with an increase in the concentration; i.e., a smaller proportion of women having 1/2 the children. The big exception is China, where fertility declined steeply without an increase in concentration.