With the rapid decline of global birth rate, the "winter" of population is coming?
Fern á ndez Villaverde, an economics professor specializing in population at the University of Pennsylvania, said that the global fertility rate had dropped to between 2.1 and 2.2 last year, which would be the first time in human history that it was lower than the global substitution level.
Suddenly there were not enough babies.
On May 13, according to media reports, the world population is moving towards a critical turning point, that is, the global total fertility rate (the average number of children born per woman in her lifetime) will fall below the level of maintaining population balance, and this may have happened.
According to the statistics of the United Nations, the global total fertility rate in 2017 was 2.5, and the United Nations believed that it would fall to 2.4 in the late 2020's. However, by 2021, it will have dropped to 2.3, close to the global substitution level of 2.2 that demographers believe.
Although the United Nations has not yet released the estimated fertility rates for 2022 and 2023, it is reported that Jess ú s Fern á ndez Villaverde, an economics professor specializing in population studies at the University of Pennsylvania, reached his own estimate by combining the previous United Nations projections with the actual data covering about half of the world's population in the past two years. He said that the global fertility rate had dropped to between 2.1 and 2.2 last year, which would be the first time in human history that it was lower than the global substitution level.
Fern á ndez Villaverde also warned: "The population winter is coming."
Fertility rate declines into a global trend
According to the report, in developed countries, the fertility rate was already below the replacement level in the 1970s, and further declined during the COVID-19 epidemic. The fertility rate of developing countries is also declining. India overtook China to become the most populous country last year, but its fertility rate has also been lower than the replacement level.
In addition, Fern á ndez Villaverde also found that the number of births reported by national birth registries was generally 10 to 20 per cent less than the United Nations forecast.
For example, the number of newborns reported by the United States last year was 3.59 million, 4% less than the United Nations forecast. In some other countries, the decline in the number of births was even greater: Egypt reported a 17 per cent decline in the number of newborns last year; Kenya reported an 18% reduction in the number of newborns in 2022.
It is worth mentioning that in 2017, the world population was 7.6 billion. At that time, the United Nations predicted that the world population would continue to grow to 2100, when it would reach the peak of 11.2 billion. However, by 2022, the United Nations has lowered its forecast and advanced its peak to 10.4 billion yuan in the 2080s. This may also be outdated. The Institute for Health Indicators and Assessment of the University of Washington now believes that the world population will begin to decline after reaching a peak of about 9.5 billion in 2061.
Governments of all countries encourage fertility but have little effect
Many government leaders believe that low fertility is the most urgent problem facing a country. They worry that shrinking labor force, slowing economic growth, insufficient pension funds, and fewer and fewer children will reduce social vitality. At the same time, the decrease of population also means the decline of global influence.
Therefore, governments of all countries have introduced many policies to encourage fertility, and the most prominent one is Japan.
As early as the early 1990s, after Japan's fertility rate dropped to 1.5, the government launched a series of plans, including parental leave and subsidies for nursery fees. But the fertility rate is still declining.
In 2005, Japan appointed Kuniko Inoguchi, the first minister responsible for gender equality and birth rate. She claimed that the main obstacle to procreation was money: people could not afford to marry or have children. Subsequently, Japan implemented a free inpatient maternal care system and introduced a child birth allowance. As a result, Japan's fertility rate rose from 1.26 in 2005 to 1.45 in 2015. However, it began to decline again and returned to 1.26 by 2022.
This year, Japanese Prime Minister Takeo Kishida launched another plan to encourage childbearing. This plan provides subsidies to all children under the age of 18 every month, and provides free college education and full paid parental leave for families with three children.
South Korean President Yoon Seok Yuet said on May 9 that he intended to set up a new ministerial unit to solve the problem of low fertility in the country. Official data show that although South Korea has invested billions of dollars to encourage women to have more children and maintain population stability, the number of births in South Korea fell to an all-time low last year.
The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has promoted one of the most ambitious family planning initiatives in Europe. Last year, he extended a preferential tax policy for mothers, so that women who have children under the age of 30 can be exempted from personal income tax for life. This does not include housing and child care subsidies and generous maternity leave.
In the United States, although state and federal legislators have promoted the expansion of child care subsidies and parental leave, they usually do not take raising the birth rate as an explicit goal. However, some Republicans are leaning in this direction. Last year, Trump said that he supported the "baby bonus" to support the birth rate in the United States, and the Republican Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake recently supported this idea.
Source: Yuan Wei on Wall Street
