Seasonality of Births in Europe and the USA: A Comparative Approach

Byron Kotzamanis, University of Thessaly
Anastasia Kostaki, Athens University of Economics and Business

During the post-war years, the daily births in the developed countries suggest a systematic decline in Saturdays and Sundays. This phenomenon is related to practices of the medical profession as for obvious reasons, they plan their working hours. Such practices have a significant impact on hospital infrastructure as they cause overload on certain days, and under-utilization of the hospital services in others. However the intensity and the starting time of this phenomenon, significantly differ between countries, while in some of them, the appearance of reactions, as well as awareness of the medical body, resulted to a reversal of this trend in recent years. In this work a comparative analysis of the daily fluctuations of births in the EU countries and the USA is attempted. An index is developed for measuring the intensity of this phenomenon and time series analysis techniques are applied in order to describe its pattern through time.