Quantifying the Role of Self-Declared Obstacles to Unachieved Fertility: Proposing A New Method
摘要
The discrepancies between desired and actual fertility rates are one of the key topics in fertility studies. This paper aims to explore the fertility gap—the difference between desired fertility size and actual fertility outcomes, and how this gap can be decomposed according to the importance of various perceived barriers to fertility. This article introduces an innovative approach to quantify the impact of removing obstacles that individuals report prevent them from having a child (or another child) on the total fertility rate (