Timing of childbearing in below replacement fertility regimes: how and why Brazil is different?

José Eustáquio Diniz Alves, Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE)
Suzana M. Cavenaghi, Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE)

Several Latin American countries have reached below replacement fertility, if not for the country’s average, at least for large socioeconomic or regional groups. Brazil, the largest Latin American country, has already reached below replacement fertility. While in most low fertility countries there occurred a delay in childbearing as fertility rates decreased, displacing the mode of fertility curve to high age groups, in Brazil there is an increasing rejuvenation of the fertility schedule. The objective of this paper is to investigate whether the timing of childbearing in Brazil has the same pattern of having soon and few children for several socioeconomic groups in order to foresee the path of fertility in the future in Brazil, and to understand why and how fertility schedule is so different from other low fertility experiences. This is important, among other things, to infer about population growth in the next years, since generations will replace each other very quickly under the current pattern.