Human fertility in the less-developed countries has declined substantially in aggregate over the past fifteen years. Although the declines have not occurred evenly—many countries, according to the best statistical information that is currently available, have yet to be affected—they have been felt in the major population centres of the poor world. Delays in the recognition of fertility decline are often more than a decade in less-developed countries, owing to the state of the art of collecting social statistics; analyses of the present condition, therefore, are necessarily tentative.

In the 1960s, the ‘taxonomy’ of fertility decline in the less-developed countries was simple: those nations ‘suffering’ fertility decline were either undergoing rapid development, were geographically distinct as islands, or were ethnically distinct as largely Chinese populations. Such a simple categorization no longer holds up; in fact, it is hard to make any ‘big picture’ generalizations about the nations that are now experiencing a decrease in family size. Future research workers should take this as a cue to look more closely at the ‘micro’ aspects of fertility—those incentives which affect couples directly in their decisions about children—for in the final analysis it is couples and not nations which decide to become parents.

Research workers might also with advantage pay closer attention to the connection between economic development and fertility, for the vast array of societies and economies that are now found to have declining fertility rates, would seem to call into question many of the assumptions about the so-called ‘demographic transition’, with which we have lived so comfortably for more than a generation.