ECONOMIC AND CULTURAL FACTORS IN DEMOGRAPHIC BEHAVIOR

ECONOMIC AND CULTURAL FACTORS IN DEMOGRAPHIC BEHAVIOR, Patrick R. Galloway, E. A. Hammel, R. D. Lee

The origins of this project were two-fold.

1. The general conclusions of the Princeton European Fertility Project (PEFP), to the effect that economic and structural factors cannot be shown to have important effects as determinants of the level of fertility or of its decline, are contrary both to intuition and to theoretical expectation.

2. The quality and local specificity of the data on Prussia c. 1849-1914 permit much closer testing of the determinants of fertility and of fertility decline than the PEFP was able to use. In order to achieve comparability across a broad range of countries with available data, PEFP was obliged to use major regional units, akin to provinces or states. However, for much of the late mediaeval and early modern periods such units were largely autarkic economies with substantial internal variation, such that the variance between such units was likely to be less than the variance within them, in respect of variables of interest. Thus, comparison between such units suffered from minimal variance in the variables of interest, other than those of national identity (including language). The data on Prussia, however, are at the Kreis level and permit much closer testing of hypotheses about the relationship between structural and demographic variables. Realization of the possibilities in the Prussian materials led Galloway to formulate an approach, which, implemented with the participation of Hammel and Lee, led to the UC Prussia Project (UCPP).

The general conclusions of the research are that socalled cultural variables, proxied by language and religion, are important determinants of the level of fertility but not of the rate of fertility decline. On the other hand, structural and economic variables are powerful determinants of the rate of fertility decline and thus in the long run must be determinants of ultimate levels of fertility. This formulation, supported by sophisticated pooled time series analysis of data of impeccable quality, is an important refinement of the conclusions of PEFP by UCPP.