Why are global birth rates falling? Part 1

It’s all over the news

It’s early morning. After I have willed myself out of bed and got my kids ready for the day, I sit down to eat my breakfast (either soggy cereal or cold porridge, the staple of parents of young children everywhere) and read the news. The algorithm already knows what I am interested in, so most of the headlines I come across are at least vaguely intriguing. After a quick scroll, I notice it. Another one. I click and skim through the article, but there really isn’t anything new there. The title reads, ‘2023 saw the lowest recorded birth rate ever in insert random country’. I mentally archive the article with a dozen other similar ones I have come upon in the last several months, each about a different country around the world. They are all experiencing the same trend.

Obviously, I know that birth rates have been declining for a while now, globally. As society progresses and advances, the reduction in birth rates is a common consequence of this. Female empowerment and education, advances in medicine and technology, are just a few reasons why fertility declines as a country becomes more modern. But I was always under the impression that there is a peak level that a society reaches once it is accepted into the ‘First World’ group where fertility stays at a constant rate.

After all, this is what I was taught in school: First World countries have low fertility rates, Third World countries have high fertility rates and as a country progresses from the latter to the former, the birth rate declines. But apparently, fertility does not stop at some magical point (the coveted ‘replacement rate’ of 2.1, which is the average number of children per woman needed to maintain the population at a stable number). 

For some reason, these recent headlines seem more alarming. They suggest that birth rates have been falling for some time and show no signs of stopping, and that this is very, very bad. In many places, the birth rate is already well below the replacement rate. Is this what is causing the alarm? Or is it the fact that this trend is occurring even in economically prosperous, peaceful and happy places, where you would expect a great environment and opportunities to raise children?

Are the reasons less about individual countries and more about universal issues affecting people worldwide? Have we finally discovered the side effects of our overuse of plastics, and are microplastics making people infertile?! Now I am in a spiral of ever more distressing questions, so I need to get to the bottom of this. Fortunately, most of the information I need is already available.

What does the data show?

These are just some of the headlines I’ve seen this year in the news. Enough to make any normal person think: “WTF is happening?”, am I right? All these news articles present the same general trend: the birth rate is falling, the number of births is falling, and the fertility rate (FR) in all these news articles is not even close to the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. The funny (not “haha” funny but “we’re all going to die” funny) thing is that this is happening everywhere around the world. The only exception is Sub-Saharan Africa, where the decline has been much slower, but we’ll come back to this stubborn little outlier later.

The fact is that global fertility rates have been falling since the 1960s, so what’s the big deal now? My understanding (from spending way too much time doing research for this post) is that demographers thought the fertility rate had already stabilized in most ‘advanced’ countries (I use ‘advanced’ here to refer to countries with normal access to health, education, and human rights) around the 2000s. However, in recent years, the rate has started to decline even in places where it was previously stable. Our World in Data has a great interactive chart that nicely depicts this trend.

It is happening in Europe, where the number of live births in the European Union (EU) has reached its lowest level since 1960. In places like Spain and Italy, where the FR has been steadily low since the 1990s, it recovered a bit in the 2000s, but has now dropped to record levels. Even France, which still has the highest FR in the EU, has seen a significant drop since 2011. Scandinavian countries, renowned for their good living environment and population happiness, are also experiencing these same trends and have seen a decrease in their FR over the last few years. Some other EU countries like Hungary and Estonia, which saw a reversal of low birth rates in recent years due to generous benefits offered to new parents, have again seen the rate decline and are now also reporting record low FR-s.

It’s happening in the Americas, both in the US and Canada, as well as in Latin countries such as Mexico, Brazil, and Costa Rica. Most famously, it’s happening in highly advanced East Asian countries like China, Japan and South Korea (which currently has the world’s lowest FR of only 0.78 children per woman), whose populations have already started to shrink. In places like Iran and Thailand, the fertility rate is already at the same level as in the EU. And in Southeast Asia, where some of the world’s most populous countries are located (e.g., Indonesia and India), the FR has now reached the replacement rate and is on track to keep on falling.

The only part of the world still experiencing a demographic explosion is Sub-Saharan Africa, with places like Niger still having a fertility rate of around 6 or 7 children per woman. However, in other parts of the continent, the FR has already dropped to 3 children per woman, and the trend continues to decline.

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So, the data paints a pretty clear picture of the situation. But it doesn’t really answer my main question of “Why?”. As I discovered, there is no single clear answer for it. It’s more like a natural process that, once put in motion, cannot be stopped. Stay tuned for Part 2, where I dive deeper into this question and try to get to the bottom of it once and for all.