Insights on 21st‑Century Birthrates: The Role of Women's Education and Labour Participation

These comprehensive datasets examine the socioeconomic and demographic determinants shaping global fertility trends throughout the 21st century, covering the period from 2000 to 2023. Together, they provide an integrated analytical framework for understanding the factors influencing fertility patterns worldwide. The first dataset is organized at the country–year level, where each row represents a specific observation (e.g., Spain in 2015). This structure offers a detailed and granular perspective on demographic evolution over time. The data incorporates multiple dimensions of human and economic development to contextualize fluctuations in birth rates: the Fertility Rate serves as the principal variable of interest, while indicators such as GDP per capita (economic output), Female Education (secondary and tertiary attainment rates), and Female Labour Force Participation (economic agency) function as explanatory variables. The second dataset contains the same indicators as the first; however, rather than being organized by country, it is aggregated at the level of world regions. This arrangement facilitates broader comparative analyses and supports the identification of large-scale demographic patterns across major global areas. Collectively, these datasets are structured to support longitudinal analysis, enabling researchers to explore how economic development and women’s empowerment correlate with changing fertility dynamics across both individual countries and broader world regions. Each dataset is accompanied by its corresponding codebook, which describes all the variables. The interactive dashboard, as an Excel file, integrates both datasets to visualize the relationship between women’s empowerment and demographic shifts. It features dynamic line graphs for longitudinal trends in population, fertility, and labor participation, alongside box plots and scatter plots that correlate educational attainment with birth rates. With built-in slicers for regions and education levels, plus a time-series animation tool, the dashboard allows users to observe the year-by-year evolution of global fertility dynamics from 2000 to 2023.