There Is Little Evidence for Reversing Low Fertility Rates

First some chit-chat, then new data. Follow my posts on this at the fertility tag.

It’s hard to know how to approach unprecedented times. Although birth rates have been falling around the world for decades, with subsequent rising average ages, we do not have experience with whole countries going through sustained population decline. So we don’t know how that will affect society, or how best to cope with it. Further, although a number of countries rebounded somewhat from very low fertility rates, we have no experience of countries climbing from very low birth rates back up to replacement-level fertility, so we can’t say how that might be accomplished (or even if it’s a good idea to try).

In the demographic establishment, which includes big state bureaucracies and non-governmental research and public health actors, there is what I once referred to as a “fetishization of normality.” People may be willing to forecast catastrophic or shocking events if current trends insist on it, but there is a strong tendency to assume things will trend back toward normal (they like to say “equilibrium”), which in the case of fertility is something like replacement level. This is apparent in the United Nations World Population Prospects 2024 report. Although they assume declining world fertility rates, mostly because of falling fertility in Africa, for countries with low fertility already, they inexplicably (to me) often assume fertility will start rising again now. Here are four cases: Germany, Japan, USA, and China. In each case the UN predicts rising total fertility rates (TFRs) starting tomorrow even though rates are falling today. This seems nonsensical.

In contrast to the UN report, the Gates Foundation Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) forecasts, recently published in the Lancet, predicts fertility rates in almost every country will be lower in 2100 than they are today. The methods in that report are super complex and opaque, but that basic element seems more reasonable to me, based on actual history.

In the development of Second Demographic Transition theory, Ron Lesthaege used the phrase, “structural
subreplacement fertility” as a feature of the post-transition society, focusing on Europe and related societies. In a 2020 follow-up paper, Lesthaege assessed several possible trends that might lead to rising fertility again, from the very low levels that helped prompt development of the theory in the late 20th century — especially advancing human development and progressive gender equality within families. He finds that neither trend seems to have done much to drive birth rates back up. The IHME forecasts, similarly, apply only small increases in fertility as a result of hypothetical “pronatal” policies such as “childcare subsidies, extended parental leave, insurance coverage expansion for infertility treatment, and other forms of support for parents to afford high-quality child-care services.” Together they predict such policies would increase the total fertility rate of a country by just 0.2 births per woman. That makes sense to me because such policies might make it easier for people to have children, but they also make it easier for women to have careers while raising children, which leads some people to have fewer children (maybe more happily).

Today’s illustrations

A number of times in recent months, journalists have asked me what governments can or should do to increase fertility rates and stave off population decline. I keep saying we just don’t have reason for optimism, or high-confidence suggestions for this. And of course some of the interventions — how about Nazism? — are bad. So I don’t have much to offer.

But I should be more empirical in my answers. So here are a few ways to look at it, using the data package from the UN report, which includes TFRs for all countries from 1950 to 2023. Excluding those with fewer than 2 million people, I get 75 countries that have ever had TFRs below 2.1, across six regions. Of those, two currently have TFRs greater than 2.1: Mongolia and Kazakhstan.*

The main point is clear: Almost no one has gotten back above 2.1 once they fell below that level.

My figure here also shows the year of lowest TFR, with black dots, which illustrates how Europe was an early site of low fertility troughs. That a lot of those dots are in and around the 1990s means they are no longer at their lowest levels, unlike the low fertility countries in the rest of the world, almost all of which are at their lowest levels now, more or less. So, are these success stories of rising fertility rates? Zooming in the figure below shows the 20 biggest European/Central Asian countries that ever fell below 2.1 TFR. You can see the former Soviet-sphere countries — Belarus, Czechia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Romania, and Russia — all hitting a trough and then bouncing back, which is partly the timing effect, as women delayed births and then caught back up. But no countries on the chart show consistently rising TFRs at present.

Finally, what about very low fertility? Here are the 20 biggest countries that ever had TFRs below 1.5 births per woman. The former communist countries, except Romania, are all heading back down after their rebounds. Among the rest, they are all at their lowest levels now (except Spain and Italy, which had super low troughs in the 1990s). So the very low fertility countries are almost all heading toward even lower levels at present.

In conclusion, I see no reason to think fertility will increase in the foreseeable future, anywhere it has fallen to a low, much less very low, level. I concur with the people who say things like, “It’s time to stop arguing over the population slowdown and start adapting to it.”

* I’m not familiar with the history of Kazakhstan, but this article makes the case that the main story is the fertility crash that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union, not a particular set of pro-natal policies or events. This may also apply to places with similar trends, like Uzbekistan.

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Previously Published on familyinequality with Creative Commons License

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