Refine
Document Type
- Article (1)
- Working Paper (1)
Language
- English (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (2)
Keywords
- Birth order (1)
- Eastern and Western Germany (1)
- Fertility (1)
- Germany (1)
- Perinatal Statistics (1)
Until 2008, Germany’s vital statistics did not include information on the biological order of each birth. This resulted in a dearth of important demographic indicators, such as the mean age at fi rst birth and the level of childlessness. Researchers have tried to fill this gap by generating order-specifi c birth rates from survey data, and by combining survey data with vital statistics. This paper takes a different approach by using Perinatal Statistics to generate birth order-specific fertility rates for the period 2001 to 2008. Perinatal Statistics includes information on births that took place in German hospitals. Out-of-hospital births, which account for about 2 % of all births, are not included in the Perinatal Statistics. In a sensitivity analysis, we show how robust our estimates are to the inclusion of out-of-hospital births. Our general assessment is that the Perinatal Statistics is a valuable source for generating order-specific fertility rates, regardless of whether out-of-hospital births are included.
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.