The world is at a startling demographic milestone. The global fertility rate will soon drop below the point needed to keep population constant. It may have already happened.
Fertility is falling almost everywhere for women across all levels of income, education, and labor-force participation. The falling birthrates come with huge implications for the way people live, how economies grow and the standings of the world’s superpowers.
In high-income nations, fertility fell below replacement in the 1970s, and took a leg down during the pandemic. It’s dropping in developing countries, too. India surpassed China as the most populous country last year, yet its fertility is now below replacement.
“The demographic winter is coming,” said Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, an economist specializing in demographics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Many government leaders see this as a matter of national urgency. They worry about shrinking workforces, slowing economic growth and underfunded pensions; and the vitality of a society with ever-fewer children.
Smaller populations come with diminished global clout, raising questions in the U.S., China and Russia about their long-term standings as superpowers.
Some demographers think the world’s population could start within four decades—one of the few times in history. Donald Trump, this year’s presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has called collapsing fertility a bigger threat to Western civilization than Russia.
A year ago Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida declared that the collapse of the country’s birthrate left it “standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society.”
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has prioritized raising the country’s “demographic GDP.” Governments have rolled out programs to stop the decline—but so far they’ve barely made a dent.
In 2017, when the global fertility rate—a snapshot of how many babies a woman is expected to have over her lifetime—was 2.5, the United Nations thought it would slip to 2.4 in the late 2020s.
Yet by 2021, the U.N. concluded, it was already down to 2.3—close to what demographers consider the global replacement rate of about 2.2. The replacement rate, which keeps population stable over time, is 2.1 in rich countries, and slightly higher in developing countries, where fewer girls than boys are born and more mothers die during their childbearing years.
