Fertility in Japan: curve-fitting the total fertility rate

From Demography

This is a subsidiary page to the fertility in Japan page that discusses different models to explain the total fertility rate data in Japan (1947-200. We draw on Human Fertility Database data (data downloaded on December 2, 2013, last updated August 8, 2012). The data collected by the Human Fertility Database is based on government data collection by the government of Japan. Details about the modalities of data collection are available here.

Raw time series data

Linear model

Single straight line fit

Denote by the year. Then, the best linear fit predicting the total fertility rate in year is:

Quick summary information about the goodness of fit is below (paste from R data, needs to be converted to table):

Residuals:
     Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max 
-0.77971 -0.19170 -0.02246  0.08087  1.59348 

Coefficients:
             Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept) 65.871500   6.016802   10.95 4.98e-16 ***
yearrange   -0.032306   0.003042  -10.62 1.69e-15 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 0.439 on 61 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared:  0.649,     Adjusted R-squared:  0.6433 
F-statistic: 112.8 on 1 and 61 DF,  p-value: 1.693e-15

The total fertility rate values, along with the residuals from this best linear fit, are below:

Year TFR TFR residual from best linear fit
1947 4.566 1.5934791667
1948 4.444 1.5037847542
1949 4.357 1.4490903418
1950 3.672 0.7963959293
1951 3.281 0.4377015169
1952 2.995 0.1840071045
1953 2.713 -0.065687308
1954 2.502 -0.2443817204
1955 2.383 -0.3310761329
1956 2.236 -0.4457705453
1957 2.058 -0.5914649578
1958 2.129 -0.4881593702
1959 2.061 -0.5238537826
1960 2.008 -0.5445481951
1961 1.963 -0.5572426075
1962 1.974 -0.51393702
1963 2.001 -0.4546314324
1964 2.045 -0.3783258449
1965 2.145 -0.2460202573
1966 1.579 -0.7797146697
1967 2.224 -0.1024090822
1968 2.127 -0.1671034946
1969 2.119 -0.1427979071
1970 2.129 -0.1004923195
1971 2.153 -0.044186732
1972 2.138 -0.0268811444
1973 2.135 0.0024244432
1974 2.04 -0.0602699693
1975 1.9 -0.1679643817
1976 1.84 -0.1956587942
1977 1.786 -0.2173532066
1978 1.774 -0.197047619
1979 1.751 -0.1877420315
1980 1.731 -0.1754364439
1981 1.726 -0.1481308564
1982 1.755 -0.0868252688
1983 1.788 -0.0215196813
1984 1.8 0.0227859063
1985 1.757 0.0120914939
1986 1.719 0.0063970814
1987 1.689 0.008702669
1988 1.657 0.0090082565
1989 1.576 -0.0396861559
1990 1.543 -0.0403805684
1991 1.537 -0.0140749808
1992 1.506 -0.0127693932
1993 1.464 -0.0224638057
1994 1.507 0.0528417819
1995 1.426 0.0041473694
1996 1.43 0.040452957
1997 1.392 0.0347585445
1998 1.388 0.0630641321
1999 1.347 0.0543697197
2000 1.359 0.0986753072
2001 1.336 0.1079808948
2002 1.318 0.1222864823
2003 1.29 0.1265920699
2004 1.288 0.1568976575
2005 1.254 0.155203245
2006 1.313 0.2465088326
2007 1.331 0.2968144201
2008 1.36 0.3581200077
2009 1.361 0.3914255952
Maximum 4.566 1.5934791667
Minimum 1.254 -0.7797146697
Mean 1.971047619 -6.02692499082228E-016
Median 1.786 -0.0224638057
Standard deviation 0.7350500406 0.4354673701

Piecewise linear models