Declining Second Birth Rates in a Country in Transition: Differences by Level of Education and Ethnic Group in Bulgaria

Elena Koytcheva, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

Since more than a decade fertility in Bulgaria has dropped to unobserved before levels and at the moment the country belongs to a group of countries with lowest-low fertility (Kohler et al. 2002). According to some authors the drop of the fertility is mainly due to the drop of the higher order births (Philipov and Kohler (2001)). The aim of this paper is to investigate which women are more prone to get a second child nowadays. The main characteristics that we take into account are the current educational level of the women and the ethnic group to which they belong. The effect of these personal characteristics will be compared for two main periods: before and after the fall of the Berlin wall. The data comes from a sample survey "Study of Natality and Reproductive Behavior" conducted in 2001. For our analysis we use hazard regression models.