An Impending Population Crisis? World Fertility Rate Hits 60-Year Low

Authored by Sylvia Xu via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Fertility rates have plummeted worldwide over the past six decades, leading experts to warn of dire consequences as the downward trend continues.

Continued low fertility rates will cause “a gradual implosion of the world’s economy as the population ages and dies,” Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, told The Epoch Times in an email. Mosher is an expert on population control, demography, and China.

“This will not occur overnight, of course, but once it is well underway it will be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse course,” he said.

Fertility rates (the average number of children born to a woman in her lifetime) are different from birthrates (the number of live births per 1,000 people in a population over a given period), although the terms are related and often used interchangeably.

Countries with low fertility rates are also likely to have low birthrates.

Macroeconomist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde called low fertility rates “the true economic challenge of our time,” in a February report for the American Enterprise Institute.

In 1960, the average woman bore four or five children in her lifetime. By 2023, that number had halved to 2.2, approaching 2.1, the replacement level—or the level at which a population replaces itself from one generation to the next.

In July, the U.S. Census Bureau projected that the world’s population will reach 8.1 billion this year. Experts say although the figure has grown from 3 billion in 1960, the number to watch is the pace of population growth.

The bureau stated that “the rate of growth peaked decades ago in the 1960s and has been declining since and is projected to continue declining.”

Fernández-Villaverde warned that while the sagging rate of growth may not have immediate consequences, in less than half a century, declining fertility will impact the world economy. Countries with low or negative birthrates will contend with a shrinking workforce and the ballooning costs associated with an aging population.

Global Fertility Rates

Only about 4 percent of the world’s population reside in a country with a high fertility rate—more than five children per woman—and all of those nations are in Africa, the Census Bureau noted. Even in those countries, fertility rates are generally lower than they once were.

The bureau reported that nearly three-quarters of the world’s population live in countries where fertility rates are at or below the replacement level.

The fertility rate in India, the world’s most populous country, has steadily declined over the past six decades. In June, the UN Population Fund reported that India’s fertility rate stood at 1.9 children per woman, down from five or six children in 1960.

In 1990, China’s fertility rate was 2.51, despite its one child policy. By 2023, it had dropped to less than one birth per woman, according to the United Nation’s population division.

In the United States, fertility has undergone a persistent decline. It fell below the replacement level in 1972 and reached 1.62 in 2023, a historic low.

Asian and European countries have the lowest fertility rates in the world, and South Korea (0.72), Singapore (0.97), Ukraine (0.977), and China (0.999) all have rates below one.

Across much of Europe, North America, and Eastern Asia, fertility rates have fallen below replacement level.

Looking Back to the ‘60s

In the Western world, the decline in fertility rates that began in the 1960s coincided with the advent of oral contraception, the legalization of abortion, and the widespread adoption of no-fault divorce.

In the United States, the first oral contraceptive was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960. Within five years, the birth rate in the United States had already declined “substantially,” a report from the National Fertility Study indicated. By 1976, the U.S. fertility rate had fallen to a record low of 1.7.

In 1973, abortion became legal in the United States following the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. At the time, a handful of other countries had also legalized abortion, including the UK, Norway, and Singapore.

The United States’ decision was followed by several countries including Denmark, South Korea, France, West Germany, New Zealand, Italy, and the Netherlands. Today, only 22 countries completely ban abortion.

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