Economic cycles shape first births in Belgium and help explain aggregate fertility trends. However, as Wood, Neels and Marynissen show, pro-cyclical fertility holds for natives and European descendants, but not for children of non-European immigrants.
Economic uncertainty has long been known to shape the timing of first births. When unemployment rates rise, many young adults postpone parenthood: a pattern often described as pro-cyclical fertility. Yet in the context of increasingly diverse societies and persistently low fertility, the existing literature falls short in two important ways.
• First, we still know surprisingly little about whether this link between economic cycles and the transition to parenthood operates in the same way for natives without a migration background and for the children of immigrants.
• Second, many studies that identify individual-level fertility responses to economic conditions (or other determinants of fertility) stop there, without examining whether these responses are strong enough to explain aggregate-level fertility trends.
As a result, we lack a clear understanding of how individual postponement decisions add up to population-level change, and whether this process differs across social groups. In a new study (Wood et al., 2025), we examine how economic cycles influence the transition to motherhood among native women without a migration background and among the children of immigrants in Belgium. Using population-wide data covering the period 1960–2010, we address economic cycles both as a correlate of individual first birth transitions and as an explanation for nationwide first birth trends.
Why Belgium? And why do we expect diverging patterns for migrants’ children?
Belgium offers a relevant lens on this question. Over the second half of the twentieth century, the country experienced repeated economic shocks, including the oil crises of the 1970s, prolonged recessions in the 1980s and 1990s, and later the Great Recession. These downturns hit young adults particularly hard, with unemployment rising sharply among women and young adults. At the same time, Belgium became increasingly diverse. The children of labour migrants from Southern Europe, Turkey, and the Maghreb reached adulthood during these decades of economic turbulence. Public debate gradually shifted from migrants themselves to the educational and labour market outcomes of their descendants, especially as persistent disadvantages became visible among children of Turkish and Maghrebi immigrants.
These structural differences matter because economic uncertainty does not carry the same meaning for everyone. For women with strong career prospects, postponing motherhood during downturns is a rational response: job loss or stalled careers make childbearing riskier in terms of career development. This applies most strongly to highly educated women and to groups with better labour market integration, such as natives and children of European immigrants.
For women facing persistently limited employment opportunities, however, waiting for economic improvement may be unrealistic. In Belgium, daughters of Turkish and Maghrebi immigrants are more likely to experience unemployment, inactivity, and insecure work. In such contexts, motherhood may become a parallel pathway to adulthood rather than something to delay until economic conditions improve. Over time, this can create norms and role models that decouple family formation from short-term economic conditions, leading to weaker procyclical fertility patterns.
A “two-stage perspective”: from individual decisions to aggregate-level fertility trends
Following the two-stage perspective on demographic inquiry proposed by Billari (2015), Neels, Marynissen, and Wood (2024) developed a methodological framework that explicitly connects individual fertility behaviour to population-level fertility trends. In simple terms, the approach works in two steps. First, hazard models estimate how likely different women are to have a first child in each year, given their characteristics (e.g. age, education, migration background) and the unemployment rate. Second, these estimates feed into Monte Carlo simulations to generate thousands of individual life courses, which are then aggregated to reproduce “model-based” annual fertility indicators. This approach allows us to assess not only whether economic cycles are associated with fertility trends, but also whether individual responses to economic uncertainty are strong enough to explain observed fluctuations in aggregate first-birth trends, and whether this process differs between natives and the children of immigrants.
Main findings
Our results show that economic downturns do not correlate with the transition to motherhood in the same way for everyone (Figure 1), and that these differences matter for fertility trends at the population level (Figure 2).
Among native women without a migration background, first births are clearly pro-cyclical. When unemployment rises, entry into motherhood slows down, especially at younger ages, while somewhat older women (in their mid- to late thirties) are more likely to “catch up”, potentially reflecting growing urgency at the end of the reproductive life course. This age pattern is consistent with earlier research.
A very similar pattern is observed for children of European immigrants, whose first births are also postponed during economic downturns, particularly at younger ages. In these groups, economic cycles translate into visible fluctuations in the proportion of women becoming mothers each year, meaning that individual postponement decisions accumulate into measurable fertility trends.
In contrast, children of non-European immigrants, especially those of Turkish origin, show a fundamentally different pattern. For these women, first birth risks remain stable or even increase during economic downturns. This evidence suggests a decoupling of economic uncertainty and family formation among groups facing structurally weaker labour market opportunities. For women of Maghrebi origin, patterns lie in-between, with some postponement at younger ages, but stability or increases at older ages.
Education further sharpens these contrasts. Highly educated women across almost all origin groups delay motherhood when unemployment rises, reflecting the importance of career stability for childbearing decisions. Lower-educated women, particularly among Turkish and Maghrebi descendants, show little postponement and sometimes higher first-birth risks during downturns. This again suggests that for women with limited economic prospects, waiting for better times may seem unrealistic, and motherhood may become a parallel pathway to adulthood rather than something to delay until stability is achieved.
In a previous study (Neels et al. 2024) we had already indicated that when these individual-level patterns are translated into macro-level fertility indicators, the implications are striking. In a more recent study (Wood et al. 2025) we show that economic cycles help explain year-on-year variation in first-birth trends for natives without a migration background (figure 2.1) and children of European immigrants (for instance, from southern Europe: Figure 2.2), but they explain very little of the variation for children of non-European immigrants (for instance, from Turkey: Figure 2.3). For these groups, fertility trends appear to be shaped by other forces, beyond education and unemployment alone.
Looking forward: implications and future research
Our findings show that recessions do not simply delay motherhood, but do so selectively, affecting solely, or at least mainly, those whose life courses are most tightly linked to labour market stability (Wood and Neels, 2017). If economic constraints such as unstable employment, low income, or insecure housing are experienced as persistent rather than temporary, waiting for “better times” may not be a realistic strategy for the descendants of non-European immigrants. Entering parenthood from this more vulnerable economic position is not without consequences: previous research shows that it is associated with lower employment continuity, higher poverty risks, and lower access to subsidised work-family reconciliation policies. In this way, early or economically unconstrained transitions to parenthood can both reflect and reinforce social inequality.
The study also illustrates why linking micro-level behaviour to macro-level trends is essential. If economic cycles shape first births differently for distinct population subgroups with varying labour market opportunities, future fertility trends will depend not only on macroeconomic conditions but also on how opportunity structures are distributed across society.
Looking ahead, this insight is highly relevant as research increasingly turns to other dimensions of uncertainty, such as housing affordability, labour market insecurity, climate change, and declining social trust. We argue that studies of these new forms of uncertainty should follow the same two-step logic applied here: examining not only whether they correlate with individual fertility transitions, but also whether they help explain aggregate-level fertility trends, and whether these links differ across population subgroups in increasingly diverse societies.
References
Billari FC. (2015) Integrating macro- and micro-level approaches in the explanation of population change. Population Studies 69: S11-S20.
Neels K, Marynissen L and Wood J. (2024) Economic Cycles and Entry into Parenthood: Is the Association Changing and Does it Affect Macro-Level Trends? Micro-Level Hazard and Simulation Models of Belgian Fertility Trends, 1960–2010. European Journal of Population 40: 13.
Wood J and Neels K. (2017) First a job, then a child? Subgroup variation in women’s employment-fertility link. Advances in Life Course Research 33: 38-52.
Wood J, Neels K and Marynissen L. (2025) Economic Cycles and the Transition to Motherhood: Differentiation between natives without a migration background and children of immigrants. Advances in Life Course Research: 100710.