Families across the world are having fewer children, particularly as more choose to be childfree.
Families across the world are having fewer children, particularly as more choose to be childfree.
Lower fertility rates, first seen in many developed economies in the 1970s, are now also being seen in global south countries such as India, Malaysia and Indonesia.
World Bank data shows that about half of the world’s countries have fertility rates at or below the generally accepted “replacement rate” of 2.1 babies per woman, meaning without immigration their populations will decline.
For most countries following this pattern, falling fertility rates are the result of more reproductive choice for women and higher rates of education. Some countries, such as Australia, bolster their populations with large immigration programmes.
High population growth is often framed by political groups as promoting religious values such as the importance of family or in outright racist terms like “protecting” racial “purity”. Extreme pronatalist beliefs are often associated with the restriction of reproductive rights for women.
Some nations that once had higher fertility rates are now struggling to adapt to lower ones.
China, for example, sought to reduce population growth with its one-child policy in the 1980s. By the 2000s, the country had a large generation of young workers supporting relatively few very young and elderly people.
Now, many of those workers have grown up. Despite China axing the one-child policy in 2015, the country’s fertility rate fell to just 1.2 births per woman in 2022.
The same year, China’s population began to shrink.
The economic effects of China’s boom-and-bust population growth will start to be felt over the next decade, as the base of retirees grows with the pulse of children born before the one-child policy. The population as a whole is expected to fall by a quarter over the next 40 years.
Caught between political extremists and the sometimes crushing forces of demography, countries have their work cut out for them catering to the demands of ageing populations.
Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.