Difference in fertility between women with and without tertiary education in Serbia

This paper points to the relative importance of childlessness (childlessness effect), postponement of motherhood to later ages (age composition effect), and fertility rates conditional upon age at entry into motherhood (rates effect) in explaining overall difference in the level of fertility between women with and without tertiary education. The author estimates these indicators for three age cohorts, 45-49, 50-54, and 55-59, and thus show whether and how the relative contribution of these three effects has changed over time. The decomposition method based on the data from the Census of Population, Households and Dwellings (2011) is used in this paper. The results indicate that the difference in fertility between women with and without tertiary education is 0.35, on average for the analyzed age cohorts. Decomposition method shows that childlessness effect and age composition effect have significantly contributed with over 80% to this difference. This finding suggests that postponing of childbearing among women with tertiary education has a continuous, dominant importance in the deterministic basis of the educational differentiation of fertility. On the other side, a weaker rates effect (20-23%) is evident in all age cohorts. Reason for this is an absence of fertility recuperation among women with tertiary education (in contrary to some European countries), thus reflecting the same (not so favorable) socio-economic and institutional context of life in which all women realize reproduction.