A Global Male Fertility Database: Rationales, Objectives, and First Results

Bruno D. Schoumaker, UCLouvain
David A. Sánchez Páez, Universidad de Valladolid
Chaimae Drioui, Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL) - Centre for demographic research

While the importance of analyzing both men and women in areas like mortality and migration is widely recognized, this idea has not yet fully permeated fertility research. This gap is evident in the scarcity of international databases on male fertility. In this paper, we present the construction of a Global Male Fertility Database, an effort aimed at providing comprehensive data on male fertility worldwide. The primary goal of this project is to reconstruct past and project future male fertility around the world. We discuss the rationales for such a database, the objectives and some challenges. In this presentation, we focus on the presentation of the methods and results for the first phase of the database. We compute male age-specific fertility rates in 185 countries, as well as derived indicators such as total fertility rates, mean age at fatherhood, variance in age at fatherhood, and the number of births by fathers' age. We also present a method for reconstructing and projecting male fertility between 1950 and 2050. Our results highlight large differences between male and female fertility in many countries, as well as the convergence between male and female fertility during the transition.

Keywords: Fertility, Comparative methods , Data and Methods

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