Abstract

PIP: High fertility and mortality rates, which characterized the demographic situation in most of the developing countries in the 1950's and early 1960's have been declining. Demographers and other scholars label this declining trend "the demographic transition." It should not be viewed as a theory or a law, but simply as a process through which societies pass from a situation characterized by high fertility and mortality to a new one marked by low fertility and mortality. Although the term was coined to describe the evolution of fertility and mortality in Europe in modern times, it is evident that not all societies follow (or should follow) the same sequence. Today, an increasing number of Asian countries are well advanced in their transition from high to low fertility and mortality rates; in 2 or 3 decades some of them have traversed from one extreme of the spectrum to the other, a feat that took more than a century for some European countries. By contrast, the large majority of African countries are at the onset of their transition or have not yet entered it at all. Latin America is somewhere in between the 2 scenarios. And the industrialized countries are experiencing a post-transitional stage in which not even the replacement of their populations is guaranteed. Many factors could be adduced to explain the differences between the Asia and the African transitions. The present article gives particular emphasis to the role of certain social, economic and cultural factors that are associated with the process of modernization. It is argued that while some elements tend to depress the supply of children (for example, postponement of entry into marriage accompanied by longer retention of women in the educational system), others tend to increase the supply, as is the case with the reduction of postpartum amenorrhea associated with the shortening of the breastfeeding period. Inhibiting the transition factors in Africa include school attendance, infant and child mortality, marriage patterns, breastfeeding, postpartum abstinence, and sterility. Asia represents the opposite picture.