Abhatoo - Centre Nationale de Documentation

The Human Fertility Database (HFD) is a joint project of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) and the Vienna Institute of Demography (VID), based at the MPIDR in Rostock, Germany.

It provides open and user-friendly access to detailed, well-documented and high-quality data on period and cohort fertility. Special focus is put on birth order-specific data that are frequently not available from usual data sources.

The HFD aims at facilitating research on changes and inter-country differences in fertility in the past and in the modern era.

The idea of this database was largely inspired by the success story of the Human Mortality Database (HMD; www.mortality.org) directed by John R. Wilmoth. Both for the HMD and the HFD the guiding principles are comparability, flexibility, accessibility, and reproducibility.