Petar Vasić1
Radoslav Ćorović2
Miodrag Pantović3
1 University of Belgrade – Faculty of Geography, Department of Demography, Serbia
2 Agency for Statistics of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnia and Herzegovina
3 Independent scholar, Serbia
DOI:
UDC: 314.12-055.2(497.6)”1950/2022”
Published: August 2026
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Keywords: total fertility rate, mean age at birth of the first child, SFR Yugoslavia, age-sex structure, estimation
Abstract:
Bosnia and Herzegovina belonged to the group of republics of the former SFRY, which recorded higher birth rates and a lower mean age at birth of the first child compared to Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia, thus, experienced “late” fertility transition. However, after independence, although with a quite favorable age structure, population fertility indicators, both absolute and relative, began their decades of marked decline. Using the demographic method, together with general scientific methods and statistical methods, we will analyze the change in birth patterns in Bosnia and Herzegovina with a focus on the last 30 years. This paper shows the change in the age model of fertility in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the consequences that this change had on the level of the total fertility rate. The problem of discontinuity, as well as the methodology of calculating fertility indicators in the inter-census period, forced the authors to use different assessment methods. Bearing in mind the unusually low fertility rate that particularly attracts attention, the paper looks at the problem of estimating the base-line population and calculating relative fertility indicators, especially in the context of the obsolescence of census data. Bosnia and Herzegovina today, in the context of the wider ex-Yugoslav area, occupies a different position when it comes to the age pattern of fertility, making the mentioned area quite homogeneous, but still retaining some peculiarities from the previous period. It is quite certain that the level of the fertility rate, and its age-pattern in Bosnia and Herzegovina do not differ significantly with other ex-Yugoslav countries.
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