International Fertility Change New Data and Insights from the.pdf

International Fertility Change: New Data and Insights from the Developmental Idealism Framework Arland Thornton University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI Georgina Binstock Centro de Estudios de Población and CONICET, Argentina Kathryn Yount Emory University, Druid Hills, GA Mohammad Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran Dirgha Ghimire University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI Yu Xie University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI Population Studies Center Research Report 10-713 June 2010 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the “Special Interdisciplinary Workshop on Fertility Declines in the Past, Present and Future: What we Don’t Know and what we Need to Know”, sponsored by the British Society for Population Studies and Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, Cambridge, England, July 15-17, 2009. It was also presented at the annual meetings of the Population Association of America, Dallas, Texas, April 15-17, 2010. International Fertility Change and the Developmental Idealism Framework 2 ABSTRACT This paper is motivated by the rapid and substantial family and fertility changes that are occurring throughout much of the world. A wide range of structural and ideational explanations have been offered for these family and fertility changes. In this paper we focus on the influence of developmental idealism—an important set of beliefs endorsing deve