Summary

The period TFR is one of the most often used indices of fertility, but it is sensitive to fluctuations in the parity distribution of women that result from changes in the timing of childbearing in successive cohorts. That is an undesirable attribute when we are interested in an estimate of the number of children that women will have at current rates, and we introduced the Bongaarts-Feeney tempo adjusted TFR* as one of several recent attempts to produce  better period measure of the fertility quantum.  

With the caveat that they will never substitute for pure cohort quantum measures of fertility, tempo adjustments are regularly used in fertility research of high income populations. Tempo adjustments in synthetic mortality indices are possibly even more controversial, and we concluded the lecture with the illustration of a couple of scenarios wherein tempo changes in mortality do and do not lead to biased estimates of the period life expectancy.