The Future of Fertility Rate in The World
Whether due to financial constraints, medical reasons, professional demand, or simply personal choice, the truth is that women are having fewer children!
But how quickly is the global fertility rate falling? How can we explain this sudden change? And what does the horizon of family size look like?
Let’s go over the world's birth rate to better understand the future of family size.
Fertility rate in the world by the numbers
(Source: Our World in Data)
A key metric is the Total Fertility Rate (TFR), which measures the number of children per woman during their childbearing ages – from 15 to 44.
According to Our World in Data, today’s global fertility rate is just below 2.3 children per woman (data 2020).
Over the last 50 years, this rate has halved!
In just a few decades, it’s expected to fall below the replacement fertility rate of 2.1 births per woman.
The replacement fertility rate is the number of births per woman needed to maintain population size.
In the past, women had many more children. However, the number fluctuated over time, with significant differences between countries.
Nevertheless, in the 60s, women had five or more children on average.
This number has been gradually falling, so 23 nations, such as Japan, Italy, Spain, and South Korea, are expected to see their population halve by 2100.
In addition, the U.S. is experiencing record-low birth rates.
Overall, this is a global trend. And, of course, as only-child parents, we’re directly responsible for that!
How quickly is the global fertility rate falling?
The graph above shows the impressive speed of the global fertility rate decline.
It took a country like Brazil only 26 years to fall from more than six children per woman in 1963 to fewer than three kids in 1989.
My mom was right in the middle of it – she had 4!
This decline has a substantial social and economic impact.
Moreover, it has already affected the demographics of countries like Japan, which has struggled with one of the world’s largest aging societies.
To put that in perspective, over 20% of the total population in Japan is older than 65.
We’ve been seeing this pattern in more developed countries.
For example, in developing regions like Sub-Saharan Africa, the average fertility rates tend to be much higher due to the lack of access to information and the high child mortality rates.
The lower level of women’s education may also be a factor.
Niger, for example, has one of the highest fertility rates, with an average number of children of 6.91 per woman.
Yet, in this country, women spend approximately only 1.3 years in school.
On the other hand, Singapore, where women have about 12 years of schooling, presents a much lower fertility rate -the number of children per woman is 1.14.
How can we explain this sudden change?
Many factors have been contributing to this fall.
Unfortunately, it isn’t easy to pinpoint the exact reasons since they vary by location and time.
However, considerable evidence is that women’s empowerment, economic change, increased living standards, and declining child mortality rates have significantly influenced them.
Effectively, women are competing head-to-head with men in education and jobs.
Access to better education makes women more conscious and confident about their choices.
In this scenario, women frequently delay having kids, which can cause an age-specific fertility problem.
Starting later leaves fewer fertile years ahead. Not to mention that the energy level usually drops (a lot!) as we age.
There are also new financial dynamics reshaping the way we see parenthood.
For example, parents would choose to have more kids in the past and poorer economies because they need their support.
They may have helped with work, taken care of younger siblings (a kind of chicken and egg situation), or given them financial aid when they aged.
Today, that financial dependency factor has all but been reversed.
In summary, parents have tremendous pressure to provide the best of the best for their kids.
This includes the best school, the best healthcare, the best extracurricular activities, the best clothing, the best food, the best trips, and so on.
All of this comes at a high cost—mainly an extensive time investment and extraordinary parental dedication.
Though there is still a population growth projection in the coming years, it’ll be much slower than in the past.
And it’s expected to stop growing by the end of the century.
The world population is expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050 and 11 billion by 2100.
However, the distribution of this growth will be uneven.
More developed countries will experience slow or negative growth, while developing nations will continue to overgrow.
This prediction has caused quite a stir in recent years as different experts debate whether the world is heading for overpopulation or underpopulation.
The lower fertility rate has had a significant impact on society as a whole.
As a result, the number of older adults increases as the number of children decreases.
This shift, known as the inverted pyramid, will significantly impact the workforce, as the population must work longer and harder to support the aging population.
How do countries tackle the downturn in birth rates?
Countries have been trying to tackle declining fertility rates in a few different ways.
One method is through financial incentives, such as paying parents to have more children.
Some nations also invest in infrastructure to make it easier for families with children to live and work.
China, for example, has been desperately trying to boost the rates since the country lifted the one-child policy in 2015.
The country has implemented various incentives to encourage more births, from improving maternal healthcare to tax reductions and housing subsidies.
Another example is in a small city in Japan, a country with one of the lowest fertility rates.
The government successfully doubled the birth rate (from 1.4 to 2.8) over nine years with an extensive scheme of family-friendly policies such as baby bonuses and child allowances.
In 2015, Hungary announced a significant new policy: families would receive subsidies to buy or build new homes.
The scheme gives a maximum benefit of approximately $36,000 to married couples with three children or more to buy a new home, in addition to a tax deduction for each house.
Final thoughts
Though I’m a happy mother of one, I worry (perhaps less than I should) about keeping our economies running smoothly.
This new reality has pros and cons, like everything in life.
The good news is that it can be great for the environment (through lower carbon emissions), create more job opportunities for everyone, and foster better education conditions.
But the inverted age structure will pose a tremendous economic, political, and social challenge.
I hope we will find ways to adapt to this new norm.
Then, ideally, we could choose to have one, two, three, or fourteen (yes, my husband’s great-grandmother did that!) or no kids without feeling any guilt about the size of our families.
