Jože Sambt

Abstract
In the mid-1980s, the average age of mothers at childbirth began
to rise rapidly. This lowers the “total fertility rate” indicator,
which shows how many children a woman would have if she
reached the end of her reproductive age and if fertility in each of
her years of age was the same as in the selected year for other
women of the same age. The total fertility rate in such
circumstances appropriately reflects the level of fertility in the
selected year but does not show people’s preferences for the
number of children, which are higher, only that people postpone
childbirth to an older age, and the total fertility rate in the current
year does not capture them. In the article, we calculate the
adjusted total fertility rate using the Bongaarts-Feeney method
by removing the ‘tempo effect’ from the total fertility rate to see
the separate level effect (‘quantum effect’). It turns out that even
in the years around 2023, when the total fertility rate was only
around 1.2, the adjusted total fertility rate practically did not fall
below the level of 1.6 children per woman. In the last five years,
however, the increase in the average age of mothers at childbirth
has completely stabilized at 31.1 years [1]. This means that the
negative “tempo” effect on the total fertility rate is no longer
present, but only the “quantum” effect remains. Since the total
fertility rate (and thus also the adjusted total fertility rate) fell
from 1.64 in 2021 to 1.55 in 2022 and further to only 1.51 in
2023, this means the lowest fertility in the history of Slovenia in
terms of the number of children people have in their lifetime. We
can only hope that fertility will not stabilize at this low level or
that the mentioned declining trend of the recent three years will
not even continue.