Branislav Šprocha, INFOSTAT – Demographic Research Centre, Centre of Social and Psychological Sciences of the Slovak Academy of Science, Slovak Republic

Type of article: scientific article
Pages: 3 – 20

Abstract

Female fertility in Slovakia has undergone significant changes since the end of World War II. The main development trend is a decrease in the average number of children, mainly due to the decrease in the proportion of women with three or more children in favour of the two-child family model. However, among the cohorts from the second half of the 1960s and the early 1970s, childlessness and the share of women with only one child have gradually increased, at the expense of the two-child model. These changes are well known at the national level, but regional differences have only rarely been analysed using cohort data. The main objective of this study is to analyse the completed cohort fertility and the parity structure of women in the districts of Slovakia based on the results of five consecutive population censuses carried out between 1980 and 2021. The obtained results also confirmed at the subnational level the decrease in completed cohort fertility, the increase in childlessness and one-child families as well as the persistence of certain regional disparities or the spatial pattern of districts with above-average and below-average levels of realised fertility.