Building a measure of the total number of years lived by Brazilian women of differents cohorts with children under the age of seven

Abstract

In this paper we present an alternative way to measure fertility rates in order to ascertain how much of a woman’s life cycle is spent in bearing and rearing children. To construct such a measure, besides the number of children born, we also considered the spacing between them and the probability that the children will survive till school-age. This gives us the average time that a representative women in a cohort lives while rearing children under the age of 7. To this end, we estimated several fertility functions for Brazilian cohorts from the 1920s to the 1980s using data from the Brazilian Censuses of 1970, 1980 and 1991, and the annual household surveys (PNADs) for 1977, 1992 and 1998. Based on the mortality functions of each period, we estimated the survival rate – up till age 7 – of the children had by the average representative women in the cohorts. Then, using this information, we constructed a measure of the average number of children per year per woman, and the average number of children per year, weighted by the relative weight of the children between ages 0 and 7.