The global birth rate is declining rapidly.ArcadeclawmachineIs the population "winter" coming?

Source: yuan Wei on Wall Street

Fern á ndez-Villaverde, a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in population, said the global fertility rate had fallen to 2% last year.Arcadeclawmachine.1 to 2ArcadeclawmachineFor the first time in human history, it will be lower than the global substitution level.

All of a sudden, there aren't enough babies.

On May 13, according to media reports, the world's population is moving towards a critical inflection point, that the global total fertility rate (the average number of children per woman's lifetime) will fall below the level of maintaining population balance, and this may have happened.

According to United Nations statistics, the global total fertility rate was 2.5 in 2017, when the United Nations thought it would fall to 2.4 in the late 2020s. By 2021, however, it had fallen to 2.3, close to what demographers believe was the global alternative level of 2.2.

Although the United Nations has not yet released estimated fertility rates for 2022 and 2023, Jeshost s Fern á ndez-Villaverde, a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in population studies, has reportedly come to his own estimate by combining previous United Nations projections with actual data covering about half of the world's population in the past two years. He said the global fertility rate had fallen to between 2.1 and 2.2 last year, which would be below the global replacement level for the first time in human history.

Fern á ndez-Villaverde therefore warned: "the cold winter of the population is coming."

The decline in fertility has become a global trend.

It is reported that in developed countries, the fertility rate has been below the replacement level since the 1970s and declined further during the COVID-19 epidemic. Fertility in developing countries is also falling. India overtook China to become the most populous country last year, but its fertility rate is also below the replacement level.

In addition, Fern á ndez-Villaverde found that the number of births reported by national birth registries was usually 10 to 20 per cent lower than that predicted by the United Nations.

The United States, for example, reported 3.59 million births last year, 4 per cent less than the UN forecast. In some other countries, the decline in births has been even greater: Egypt reported a 17 per cent drop in the number of births last year.ArcadeclawmachineKenya reported an 18 per cent decrease in the number of babies born in 2022.

It is worth mentioning that in 2017, the world's population was 7.6 billion, and the United Nations predicted that the world's population would continue to grow to 2100, when it would peak at 11.2 billion. By 2022, however, the United Nations cut its forecast and advanced its peak to 10.4 billion in the 2080s. It may also be out of date. The Institute for Health indicators and Assessment at the University of Washington now believes that the world's population will begin to decline after peaking at about 9.5 billion in 2061.

Governments encourage childbearing, but with little success

Many government leaders agree that low fertility is the most pressing problem facing a country. They worry that a shrinking labour force, slowing economic growth, inadequate pension funds and fewer children will lead to a decline in social vitality. At the same time, a decline in population also means a decline in global influence.

As a result, governments have introduced a lot of policies to encourage childbirth, the most prominent of which is Japan.

As early as the early 1990s, after Japan's fertility rate fell to 1.5, the government launched a series of plans, including parental leave and subsidies for nursery fees. But the fertility rate is still falling.

In 2005, Japan appointed Kuniko Inoguchi, the first minister in charge of gender equality and birth rate. The main obstacle to childbearing, she claims, is money: people cannot afford to get married or have children. Subsequently, Japan introduced a free hospitalized 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. But then it began to decline, and by 2022 it was back to 1.26.

This year, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida launched another plan to encourage childbirth, which provides monthly allowances to all children under the age of 18, as well as free college education and fully paid parental leave for families with three children.

South Korean President Yoon Seok-Yue said on May 9th that he planned to set up a new ministerial unit to address the country's low fertility rate. Although South Korea has invested billions of dollars to encourage women to have more children and keep the population stable, the number of births in South Korea fell to an all-time low last year, according to official figures.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has promoted one of Europe's most ambitious fertility plans. Last year, he expanded a tax credit for mothers to exempt women who have children under the age of 30 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 lawmakers have pushed for the expansion of child care subsidies and parental leave, they usually do not have a clear goal of increasing the birth rate. However, some Republicans are tilting in this direction. Last year, Trump said he supported a "baby bonus" to support the US birth rate, and Republican Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake recently supported the idea.

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