MPIDR Technical Report

Order-specific fertility estimates based on perinatal statistics and statistics on out-of-hospital births

Abstract

Until 2008, German vital statistics has not provided information on biological birth order. We have tried to close part of this gap by providing order-specific fertility rates generated from Perinatal Statistics and statistics on out-of-hospital births for the period 2001-2008. This investigation has been published in Comparative Population Studies (CPoS) (see Kreyenfeld, Scholz, Peters and Wlosnewski 2010). The CPoS-paper describes how data from the Perinatal Statistics and statistics on out-of-hospital births can be used to estimate order-specific fertility rates. The main purpose of this Technical Report is to make available the original birth counts, which were used in the study published in CPoS. Furthermore, we provide additional background information on the data sources in this report.