Faculty Scholars Award: Demographic Methods and Below Replacement Fertility in Bulgaria

Bowdoin College, Brunswick ME

Investigators

Abstract

This Faculty Scholar Award will allow Dr. Kristen Ghodsee of Bowdoin College, Maine, to travel to the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. There she will receive training in quantitative demographic methods and also collaborate with researchers who have been collecting demographic data on the fertility decline in Bulgaria. In recent years, Bulgaria has had such a low natural growth rate (-0.7 percent) that its population is declining. Bulgaria's birth rate of 1.29 per woman is now far less than the rate of 2.1 children per woman that is necessary to replace the current population. Bulgaria's population stood at 7.9 million in 2001, but the United Nations now projects that by 2050 this figure will shrink by 31 percent, which would be the second steepest decline in all of Europe. More importantly, the United Nations estimates that the percentage of the Bulgarian population over age 65 will increase from 16 percent in 2000 to 30 percent in 2050, meaning that there will be fewer people of working age to support an ever-increasing number of pensioners. However, at the same time that Bulgaria as a whole has faced a severe population decline, some minority groups have had higher-than-average birth rates. Such ethnically marked differential fertility has become increasingly common in small nations, often leading to political unrest. Dr. Ghodsee's training in demography will allow her to investigate systematically the nature of declining and differential fertility in Bulgaria, as well as its economic, social, and political consequences. Bulgaria thus will be a case study of a wider phenomenon. This award will support scientific investigation of an issue of increasing social significance and it will contribute to the professional development of a junior social scientist.