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Low Fertility in Austria and the Czech Republic: Gradual Policy Adjustments

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Low Fertility in Austria and the Czech Republic: Gradual Policy Adjustments A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Sobotka, Tomáš Working Paper Low fertility in Austria and the Czech Republic: Gradual policy adjustments Vienna Institute of Demography Working Papers, No. 2/2015 Provided in Cooperation with: Vienna Institute of Demography (VID), Austrian Academy of Sciences Suggested Citation: Sobotka, Tomáš (2015) : Low fertility in Austria and the Czech Republic: Gradual policy adjustments, Vienna Institute of Demography Working Papers, No. 2/2015, Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), Vienna Institute of Demography (VID), Vienna This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/110987 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. www.econstor.eu VIENNA INSTITUTE OF DEMOGRAPHY Working Papers 2 / 2015 Tomáš Sobotka Low Fertility in Austria and the Czech Republic: Gradual Policy Adjustments Vienna Institute of Demography Austrian Academy of Sciences Wohllebengasse 12-14 A-1040 Vienna · Austria E-Mail: [email protected] Website: www.oeaw.ac.at/vid Abstract This article provides a comparative analysis of fertility and family transformations and policy responses in Austria and the Czech Republic, two neighbouring countries in Central Europe that were until 1989 separated by the “Iron Curtain” that divided two competing political blocs in Europe. Such comparison is partly stimulated by the geographic proximity, shared history and culture of these two countries in the past and their gradual economic and social convergence in the last quarter of century. During this period both societies also grew surprisingly similar in their fertility and family patterns and main family policy trends. Fertility in both countries is relatively low, but not extremely low when compared with the countries of Southern Europe or East Asia, with the period total fertility rate recently converging to 1.45 and cohort fertility rates of the women born in the mid-1970s projected at 1.65 (Austria) and 1.8 children per woman (Czech Republic). Austrian fertility rates have been remarkably stable since the 1980s, while in the Czech Republic fertility had imploded during the 1990s, following the political regime change, before it started recovering in the 2000s. In both countries childbearing has rapidly shifted to later ages and increasingly has taken place outside marriage, with over a half of first births now born to cohabiting couples and single mothers. Czech women retain considerably lower childlessness, possibly due to the persistently strong normative support to parenthood in the country. Family policies, relatively generous in terms of government expenditures, were until recently dominated by a view that mothers should stay at home for an extended period with their children, making the return to employment difficult for women. However, recent policy adjustments in both countries have expanded the range of options available to parents, making the parental leave more flexible and, in the case of Austria, gradually expanding public childcare and supporting a stronger involvement of men in childrearing. Keywords Fertility, low fertility, family, family policies, Czech Republic, Austria Author Tomáš Sobotka, Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital (IIASA, VID/ÖAW, WU), Vienna Institute of Demography/Austrian Academy of Sciences. Email: [email protected] Acknowledgements This paper is part of a collaborative project between the East-West Center (EWC) and Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs (KIHASA) on Low Fertility, Population Aging, and Population Policy. Thanks to Minja Kim Choe and Ron Rindfuss who invited me to participate in the project and work on this manuscript. The research presented was also supported by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC Grant agreement n° 284238 (EURREP). A condensed and revised version of this paper will appear in a forthcoming book “Low and Lower: Fertility Variations across Developed Countries”. 2 Low Fertility in Austria and the Czech Republic: Gradual Policy Adjustments Tomáš Sobotka 1 Introduction Austria and the Czech Republic are two neighbouring Central European countries with similar population size (8.5 million in Austria vs. 10.5 million in the Czech Republic) and similar surface area (84 vs. 79 thousand square kilometres). They are positioned in the middle of the European Union country ranking by population size and territory. Until its implosion in 1918, both countries were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Thereafter the shrunken Austria, once the core of the Empire, became a republic administered from its “oversized” post- imperial capital, Vienna. The Czech Lands, an industrial heart of the Empire, gained independence, forming a common country with Slovakia, Czechoslovakia. The paths of these two countries then took different turns. The major long-lasting cleavage emerged after the World War II, when Czechoslovakia became incorporated into the “socialist bloc” of countries dominated by the Soviet Union, whereas Austria, while formally neutral, became a parliamentary democracy and politically and economically leaned towards Western Europe. This division cracked with the fall of Iron Curtain in 1989. Soon thereafter, in 1993, Czechoslovakia split into two independent parts and the Czech Republic was formed in its current boundary. Both countries now belong to the European Union. This article provides a comparative analysis of fertility and family transformations and policy responses in Austria and the Czech Republic. Such comparison is partly stimulated by the geographic proximity, shared history and culture of these countries in the past and their gradual economic and social convergence in the last quarter of century. An implicit question addressed throughout this article is whether family and fertility trends and the policy responses to them also grew increasingly similar in the last 25 years. I focus mostly on this period, analysing changes in fertility, fertility intentions, family, living arrangements, family values and policy trends in these two societies. To give a wider background, I also discuss longer- lasting fertility changes, in particular the historical transformations in cohort fertility, marked by an early emergence of low fertility in both countries. In conclusion, I discuss the likely future trends and outline the wish list for potential future policy actions. 2 Comparing Austria and the Czech Republic: Similarities and Differences, Continuities and Change Austria and the Czech Republic have similar culture, including the predominant Catholic religious tradition. In the past both countries were multinational, ethnically diverse societies. 3 This feature became less prominent in Austria after 1918, when once important migration streams from the other parts of the Empire ceased and even more so during the World War II, when the sizeable Jewish population was liquidated or forced to leave. But the new inflow of the “guest workers” and migrants from Central and Eastern Europe, Germany, Turkey and other countries since the 1960s has made Austria more diverse again. In contrast, the Czech Republic became ethnically homogenous after the forced deportation of the Jewish population to concentration camps in the early 1940s and the expulsion of the sizeable German population (around 2.6 million people) after the World War II. The historical social, cultural and demographic ties between Austria and the Czech Republic were severed during the lengthy period of state socialism in Czechoslovakia between the late 1940s and the late 1980s. At that time these two countries often experienced contrasting demographic trends, also in the domains of fertility and family (see also Section 4.2). Population trends in Austria progressed in sync with the trends in Western and Northern Europe (especially the neighbouring Germany and Switzerland), including the experience of the baby boom and a strong endorsement of the traditional family in the 1950s and 1960s. Trends in the Czech Republic had converged with those in eastern European countries and were marked by an almost universal marriage, early transitions to marriage and first birth, and very low childlessness. Women were expected to work, while they took almost all the responsibility for childcare and household duties as well (e.g., Sobotka 2011), whereas in Austria the male breadwinner ideal of the family was strongly entrenched
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