Peter McDonald
In the recent past, there has been considerable coverage in the media in Australia of the level of the Australian fertility rate. This has been given impetus by the publication in December 2024 of a Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of 1.49 births per woman for the year 2023-24 (ABS 2024a), the lowest level of the TFR ever recorded. In this paper, Peter McDonald discusses why the TFR is a very misleading estimate of the number of births that Australian women are having.
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