This article is restricted to a comparison of four Westem European countries: France, the Federal Republic of Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. As the crude birthrates and total period fertility rates of these countries indicate, a stabilization of fertility has set in in France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Official govemment attitudes towards these developments differ greatly, with France having clear pronatalist policy measures, the German Federal Government having only family policy measures, but some member states going further with a policy of family foundation loans. In the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, no official population policy exists, apart from a certain reluctance to accept more foreign immigrants. It must be concluded that the only common characteristic of population policies in the four countries is that they try to enable women to work and care for a family at the same time. The future effect of pronatalist population policy measures is still highly in doubt.
Definitions
In the context of this paper, there is no need to present an overview of possible definitions of population policy. One has the choice between narrow and broad definitions, that is to say, between a definition encompassing only those measures that are intended to have an effect on the size and structure of a population (narrow definition) and a definition encompassing all measures that subsequently turn out to have an effect on the size and structure of a population (broad definition). The latter group can thus include all measures in the field of housing, urbanization, family formation and dissolution, distribution of contraceptives, social and fiscal regulations, * This article was originally presented as a paper to the Annual Meeting of the