Fertility, natural growth and migration in the Czech Republic: an urban-suburban-rural gradient analysis of long-term trends and recent reversals

This paper examines long-term trends in fertility and recent reversals in natural increase, net migration, and general fertility across residential contexts in the post-communist Czech Republic. Long-term differentials are analysed on the cumulative fertility of cohorts whose fertility was completed before and after the change in political regime in 1989. The results show important effects education and residential context (urban–suburban–rural gradient) have on the cohorts with (almost) completed fertility. For the youngest cohorts with incomplete fertility, the factor of timing, education, and residential context are the strongest predictors of fertility levels. Although the results based on 2001 Czech census data show relatively persistent patterns across the cohorts, trends in natural increase, general fertility, and net migration between 1991 and 2007 show a reversal of longstanding trends due to the recent increase in the process of residential suburbanisation. We suggest that the increase in the number of babies born in suburban areas (and therefore the higher natural increase and general fertility there) is due to the selective residential migration of young couples and results not just from the larger cohorts of potential mothers but also, possibly, from the higher fertility of new resident couples owing to their more reproduction-oriented values.