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Education Fever And The East Asian Fertility Puzzle: A Case Study Of Low Fertility In South Korea, Thomas M. Anderson, Hans-Peter Kohler

Thomas M. Anderson

Fertility throughout East Asia has fallen rapidly over the last five decades and is now below the replacement rate of 2.1 in every country in the region. While similar but less extreme declines occurred throughout Europe during this same period, the declines to lowest-low fertility during the 1990s have been reversed in the last ten years as the pace of tempo changes (i.e., the postponement of childbearing) has slowed. Recent literature has shown that many European countries have in fact also experienced increases in cohort fertility. No such widespread fertility reversal has occurred in East Asia, where family size (i.e., …