Socioeconomic Conditions as Predictors of Short-term Fertility Intentions in Times of a Polycrisis

This paper shows how women’s short-term fertility intentions changed during the unfolding polycrisis between 2020 and 2022 in the Czech Republic and how this change was stratified by education and household income. We describe changes in short-term fertility intentions using predicted probabilities obtained from ordinal logistic regressions of short-term intentions on education level/income quartile over years, while controlling for age, parity, partnership status, and employment status. Data come from the second cycle of the Generations and Gender Survey (GGS-II), wave 1 from the Czech Republic, which was conducted between 2020 and 2022. Short-term fertility intentions declined in most education and income groups between 2020 and 2022. Only among women in the highest income quartile, there is no apparent decline in short-term intentions from 2020 to 2022. Among women with lower education, short-term fertility intentions declined more rapidly than among women with higher education. There apparently is a much stronger demographic resilience among women in the wealthiest households. Resilience among the rich was likely boosted by the tax reform of 2021, which reduced the tax rate of individuals in the highest income quintile by almost 5 % on average, while the tax rate in the lowest quintile dropped only by 2 %. This tax change could have weakened the sensitivity of the richest individuals to the unfolding polycrisis.