MPIDR Working Paper

Boom, echo, pulse, flow: 385 years of Swedish births

Riffe, T., Barclay, K. J., Klüsener, S., Bohk-Ewald, C.
MPIDR Working Paper WP-2019-002, 29 pages.
Rostock, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (January 2019)
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Open Access
Reproducible

Abstract

Human population renewal starts with births. Since births can happen at any time in the year and over a wide range of ages, demographers typically imagine the birth series as a continuous flow. Taking this construct literally, we visualize the Swedish birth series as a flow. A long birth series allows us to juxtapose the children born in a particular year with the children that they in turn had over the course of their lives, yielding a crude notion of cohort replacement. Macro patterns in generational growth define the meandering path of the flow, while temporal booms and busts echo through the flow with the regularity of a pulse.

Keywords: Sweden, fertility
The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock is one of the leading demographic research centers in the world. It's part of the Max Planck Society, the internationally renowned German research society.