Fertility decline and the emergence of excess female survival in post-reproductive ages in Italy
Gianbattista Salinari,
Gustavo De Santis,
Virginia Zarulli,
Cristina Giuliani,
Claudio Franceschi,
Marco Breschi
Affiliations
Gianbattista Salinari
Department of Economics and Business Sciences, University of Sassari
Gustavo De Santis
Department of Statistics, University of Florence
Virginia Zarulli
Interdisciplinary Centre On Population Dynamics, University of Southern Denmark
Cristina Giuliani
Laboratory of Molecular Anthropology and Centre for Genome Biology, Department of Biological, Geological and Environmental Sciences, University of Bologna
Claudio Franceschi
Department of Applied Mathematics and Laboratory of Systems Biology of Aging, Lobachevsky University
Marco Breschi
Department of Economics and Business Sciences, University of Sassari
Abstract In Italy, at least in the cohorts born up to the beginning of the twentieth century, women’s mortality in post-reproductive ages was influenced by fertility, with large progenies (and, to a lesser extent, childlessness) leading to markedly lower survival chances. This relationship proved strong enough to affect the female-to-male ratio in old age as fertility declined. In this paper, we show that various measures of extra female survival at high ages are closely connected to the fertility transition in Italy, and to its peculiar historical and geographical evolution.
