New edition of Population Notes contributes to improving and updating the understanding of the demographic dynamics and behaviors of the region

The latest edition of the journal Notas de Población, published by the Latin American and Caribbean Demographic Centre (CELADE) – Population Division of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), features a variety of articles that address highly topical and relevant issues for understanding demographic trends and behaviours and their relationship to development, as well as contributing especially to public policies related to these trends and behaviours.

Beyond the themes, several articles are framed in theoretical discussions, contributing to current conceptual debates. Most of them use standard sources, data, indicators and methodological approaches from demography and population studies, while others make use of novel procedures, as well as techniques originating in other disciplines. All of the articles reflect on the public policy implications of the results and findings.

Issue 118 of the biannual publication opens with an article by Helena Cruz Castanheira entitled “Female labor force participation and the availability of public daycare in Brazil.” The author uses statistical methods frequently used in econometrics and data collected by Brazil’s main household survey (PNAD) to empirically estimate the effect in Brazil of a federal childcare reform implemented in 2006 and 2007 that increased the availability of public daycare.

In the following article, entitled “Educational expansion in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay and its impact on age at first birth”, Mathias Nathan addresses the effect of education on the postponement of motherhood. To assess the effect of educational expansion on the age at which one has one’s first child, he focuses on the three Southern Cone countries of the region (Argentina, Chile and Uruguay), uses survey and census data from the early 2010s to estimate probabilities of nulliparity by age and decomposes the composition and rate effects behind changes in this probability across cohorts.

Bruno Ribotta, Enrique Peláez, Laura Acosta, Lucía Andreozzi, Leandro M. González, Lucas Vanoli Faustinelli and Malena Piancatelli are the authors of the work “Neither very very nor so so”? Situation and evolution of the birth rate in the province of Córdoba (Argentina) in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic”. Taking into account the different hypotheses and debates that have taken place in relation to the effect of the pandemic on fertility, in particular whether it increased or rather reduced it, and the lack of solid evidence in this regard in the countries of the region, the study focuses on empirically evaluating the impact of the pandemic on birth rates in a specific subnational case: the province of Córdoba, Argentina.

“Food security and labor informality: a study of Mexican households at the state level (2018-2022)” is the title of the fourth article in this issue, whose authors are Daniel Lozano Keymolen and Sergio Cuauhtémoc Gaxiola Robles Linares. The study is also framed within the COVID-19 pandemic and its impacts, although in this case it focuses on household food security and employment formality. The authors analyze the relationship between the pandemic, food security, and informality using data from representative household surveys at the state level and considering territorial specificities.

Gilvan Guedes, Kenya Valeria Micaela de Souza Noronha, Lara de Melo Barbosa Andrade, Daniele Tôrres Rodrigues, Albert Smith Feitosa Suassuna Martins, share their study entitled “A sequential and spatial approach to extreme precipitation and sociodemographic conditions related to natural disasters in the semi-arid region of Brazil”, clearly anchored in the theme of population and environment. Their analysis focuses on the semi-arid region of Brazil, which is characterized by widespread poverty and chronic rainfall deficit, along with a more heterogeneous distribution of extreme weather events. The analysis focuses on the characteristics of the population exposed to these weather events and their capacities to cope with them.

Justo Rojas López is the author of the work “Stability of marital cohabitations in Mexico: changes and permanences over time”, which is one of the three in this issue of Notas de Población dedicated to the topic of union and family. The author focuses on consensual unions and some of their key features – in particular their duration, their transition to dissolution or marriage, and their probability of being a space for child-rearing – both to better understand these unions and to provide evidence to the theoretical debate on them, which faces the theory of the Second Demographic Transition, which grants a strategic status to these unions as a reflexive alternative to marriage, and the theory of uncertainty, which gives them a rather reactive and transitory status in the face of adversities and uncertainties that temporarily inhibit marriage.

The penultimate article, “The educational gradient of marital dissolution in Ecuador” is by Adriana Robles. The author focuses on the differential associated with the educational level of the chances of marital dissolution in the first union. Once again, the conceptual discussion has the theory of the Second Demographic Transition as the protagonist – due to its approach that the greatest dissolution is part of the emerging family model that is experienced first by the most educated and then spreads to the rest of the women – which is now confronted with the theory of the gender revolution, which suggests the possibility of an inverse gradient because the most educated women, and therefore more self-sufficient, are in better conditions to negotiate with their partners and achieve more stable relationships.

The last article, and the third one related to the topics of union and family, belongs to Carlos Fernández Moreno who shares the study “Multinuclear family, the new form of family recomposition?: an estimate based on the information provided by children in Mexico”. Fernández begins by stating that family structures face profound modifications after a separation of a couple with children, since new relationships are established, some with offspring, creating new family nuclei. As children join two or more family nuclei, they give rise to a multinuclear family, this type of family modalities being scarcely studied and not at all quantified by official statistics. The study aims to reduce these gaps in knowledge and data.

Notes on Population is a biannual publication with 50 years of experience whose main purpose is to disseminate studies on the population of Latin American and Caribbean countries, although it also accepts contributions referring to other regions of the world.

For questions and comments, contact the Population Notes Secretariat: Maria Ester Novoa, [email protected]