3 Attachment(s)
Fertility rate: Global crash in children being born
Falling fertility rates mean nearly every country could have shrinking populations by the end of the century.
And 23 nations - including Spain and Japan - are expected to see their populations halve by 2100.
Countries will also age dramatically, with as many people turning 80 as there are being born.
What is going on?
The fertility rate - the average number of children a woman gives birth to - is falling.
If the number falls below approximately 2.1, then the size of the population starts to fall.
In 1950, women were having an average of 4.7 children in their lifetime.
Researchers at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation showed the global fertility rate nearly halved to 2.4 in 2017 - and their study, published in the Lancet, projects it will fall below 1.7 by 2100.
Attachment 54480
However, this will be a truly global issue, with 183 out of 195 countries having a fertility rate below the replacement level.
Why is this a problem?
You might think this is great for the environment. A smaller population would reduce carbon emissions as well as deforestation for farmland.
"That would be true except for the inverted age structure (more old people than young people) and all the uniformly negative consequences of an inverted age structure," says Prof Murray.
Attachment 54481
The study projects:
The number of under-fives will fall from 681 million in 2017 to 401 million in 2100.
The number of over 80-year-olds will soar from 141 million in 2017 to 866 million in 2100.
Prof Murray adds: "It will create enormous social change. It makes me worried because I have an eight-year-old daughter and I wonder what the world will be like."
Who pays tax in a massively aged world? Who pays for healthcare for the elderly? Who looks after the elderly? Will people still be able to retire from work?
"We need a soft landing," argues Prof Murray.
Are there any solutions?
Attachment 54482
Countries, including the UK, have used migration to boost their population and compensate for falling fertility rates.
However, this stops being the answer once nearly every country's population is shrinking.
"We will go from the period where it's a choice to open borders, or not, to frank competition for migrants, as there won't be enough," argues Prof Murray.
Some countries have tried policies such as enhanced maternity and paternity leave, free childcare, financial incentives and extra employment rights, but there is no clear answer.
Sweden has dragged its fertility rate up from 1.7 to 1.9, but other countries that have put significant effort into tackling the "baby bust" have struggled. Singapore still has a fertility rate of around 1.3.
Prof Murray says: "I find people laugh it off; they can't imagine it could be true, they think women will just decide to have more kids.
"If you can't [find a solution] then eventually the species disappears, but that's a few centuries away."
How do countries fight falling birth rates?
The researchers warn against undoing the progress on women's education and access to contraception.
Prof Stein Emil Vollset said: "Responding to population decline is likely to become an overriding policy concern in many nations, but must not compromise efforts to enhance women's reproductive health or progress on women's rights."
What about Africa?
The population of sub-Saharan Africa is expected to treble in size to more than three billion people by 2100.
And the study says Nigeria will become the world's second biggest country, with a population of 791 million.
Prof Murray says: "We will have many more people of African descent in many more countries as we go through this.
"Global recognition of the challenges around racism are going to be all the more critical if there are large numbers of people of African descent in many countries."
Why is 2.1 the fertility rate threshold?
You might think the number should be 2.0 - two parents have two children, so the population stays the same size.
But even with the best healthcare, not all children survive to adulthood. Also, babies are ever so slightly more likely to be male. It means the replacement figure is 2.1 in developed countries.
Nations with higher childhood mortality also need a higher fertility rate.
What do the experts say?
Prof Ibrahim Abubakar, University College London (UCL), said: "If these predictions are even half accurate, migration will become a necessity for all nations and not an option.
"To be successful we need a fundamental rethink of global politics.
"The distribution of working-age populations will be crucial to whether humanity prospers or withers."
Fertility rate: 'Jaw-dropping' global crash in children being born - BBC News
Dangerous Demographics: China's Population Problem Will Eclipse Its Ambitions
7/18/2020 Dangerous Demographics: China's Population Problem Will Eclipse Its Ambitions
Dangerous Demographics: China's Population Problem Will Eclipse Its Ambitions 1/7Published on The National Interest (https://nationalinterest.org)Home >
China’s seemingly inexorable rise has hit a roadblock: demographics. And despite desperate efforts to reverse the effects of the Communist Party’s one-child policy, experts warn it may be too late to prevent lasting damage.
Government researchers have predicted that the world’s largest population will peak at 1.4 billion people in 2029. However, it will then experience an “unstoppable” decline that could see it drop to 1.36 billion by 2050, reducing the workforce by as much as 200 million. Should fertility rates remain unchanged, then China could even shrink to 1.17billion people by 2065, according to the China Academy of Social Sciences.
“From a theoretical point of view, the long-term population decline, especially when it is accompanied by a continuously aging population, is bound to cause very unfavorable social and economic consequences,” the report said. Introduced to slow population growth, China’s one-child policy that included heavy fines, forced abortions and sterilizations proved far too successful, cutting the birth rate per family from 2.9 children in 1979 to 1.6 in1995.
In 2016, the limit was raised to two children, but births declined again after a brief uptick. Last year, the number of births dropped to 15.2 million, with some cities and provinces reporting decreases as large as 35 percent. China’s fertility rate has now officially dropped to 1.6 children per woman, which is below the considered “replacement rate” of 2.1 children, although analysts have questioned whether the real rate could be as low as 1.18. Even a rate of 1.3 would see China’s population more than halve in just under eighty years.
Another legacy of the one-child policy has been a lack of women. Thanks to a preference for male heirs and selective abortions, China now has thirty-four million more men than women and by 2020 could have twenty-four million single men of marrying age unable to find wives. This situation could get even worse, with women between the ages of twenty-two and thirty-one expected to decline by 40 percent between 2015 and 2025.
Recently, more developed areas such as Beijing and Shanghai have seen fewer births than western regions such as Qinghai province, a factor linked to migration. Other areas such as the “rust belt” northeastern region, known as Dong bei, have seen a decline for economic factors, however. Yet others blame faltering “traditional concepts of marriage and parenthood.” Marriage registrations have dropped each year since 2013.Meanwhile, divorces are also increasing. “Young people’s ideas of family and giving birth are changing, and traditional values such as sustaining family lineages through giving birth have been weakening,” Nankai University’s Yuan Xin told China Daily. Other factors include rising costs of raising children, including higher housing prices and competition for quality education, together with a lack of day care facilities.
Turning PointYi Fuxian, an economist at Peking University, has suggested that the population has already started shrinking, declining in 2018 for the first time since the 1960s famines caused by the “Great Leap Forward.” “It can be seen that 2018 is a historic turning point in China’s population, ”he told the New York Times. “China’s population has begun to decline and is rapidly aging.
Its economic vitality will keep waning. A shrinking workforce is one of the first such negative outcomes for the world’s second-largest economy. The working-age population, which consists of those between the ages of fifteen and sixty-four, shrank for four straight years after peaking in 2013.As a result, China’s dependency rate—the portion of nonworking people, including children and the elderly—rose for the first time in more than thirty years in 2011 and is expected to continue rising. The nation’s elderly population could reach 400 million by the end of 2035,up from 240 million last year, according to government forecasts.
This is already hitting government budgets. Pension payouts reached 640billion yuan ($90 billion) in 2016, up 140 percent from five years earlier. Analysts suggest this figure could rise substantially, to as high as 60 trillion yuan annually by 2050, accounting for more than 20 percent of total government spending. This is despite China’s social security, pension and healthcare system being relatively limited, with an estimated 900 million Chinese living with little social safety net. These projections have added further fuel to claims that Asia’s biggest economy is “already getting old” before it gets rich.
“In advanced countries, the cohort of those aged over sixty roughly doubled to about 24 percent of the population between 1950 and 2015. At that point, per capital income was about $41,000,” notes Bloomberg Opinion columnist Shuli Ren. “In China, this process is going to take just another 12 years, to 2030. But its income per head in 2025 would still be only a third of the level in advanced economies in 2015.
Restrictions Eased Aware of the looming crisis, Chinese policymakers have moved to further loosen restrictions on family planning. Penalties are being removed at the local level for having “over-quota” children, with suggestions that birth restrictions will be abolished completely. China’s National Health Commission is now working with other departments to “research and improve policies involving taxation, employment, social security and housing to support the implementation of the universal second child policy,” China Daily noted. One such measure is a proposal to increase the retirement age from fifty-five to sixty for women and from sixty to sixty-five for men, bringing China more in line with international norms.
Local governments have also responded with subsidies, the extension of maternity leave and other initiatives including campaigns such as the “1,001reasons to have a baby. ”Yet as seen in the developed world, reversing a declining birth rate is extremely challenging, even with ultra family-friendly policies. A study by economist Lyman Stone found that even Nordic-style policies offering extensive family support have had little impact on long-term fertility, amid a declining fertility rate across advanced nations “nearly unmatched in its global breadth and its severity.”
An economic slowdown has seen the nation slip from double-digit growth in gross domestic product (GDP) to single digits, while debt has climbed to reach some 254 percent of GDP as at the end of 2018.Welcoming more foreign workers, as Japan has done, or enhancing labor productivity are seen as two ways of compensating for a shrinking workforce.
Yet Harvard Business Review contributors J. Stewart Black and Allen J. Morrison see plenty of headwinds, including declining productivity growth and a lack of openness to foreigners, including in major Chinese corporations. “If the current leadership composition continues, we predict that like Japanese firms before them, Chinese companies will begin to slide off the global 500,” Black and Morrison predict. From having a demographic dividend from a rising working-age population, an economic model “grounded in the exploitation of inexhaustibly cheap labor” is fast running out of steam. Analysts at JPMorgan see China’s growth potential slowing to 5.5 percent from the current rate of 6.5 percent between 2021 and 2025, falling further to4.5 percent by 2030, making it difficult for China to overtake the United States as the world’s biggest economy. “This means that China will remain the second-largest economy much longer than expected,” the analysts said. China’s demographic contraction will reduce its GDP growth rate as well as its ability to fund its foreign ambitions such as the Belt and Road Initiative.
The party’s social compact will also come under increasing pressure as economic growth eases and inequality rises. Meanwhile, the combined workforces of India, Indonesia and the United States are expected to keep expanding through at least 2060. A high birthrate and strong immigration levels should see the U.S. population increase from 324 million in 2017 to 390 million in 2050, while India’s population is seen overtaking China’s by 2027.If demographics are destiny, then China is facing its biggest challenge in decades with no easy long-term solution in sight.
Source URL: 404 - Page not found | The National Interest Fensom is an Australia-based freelance writer and consultant with more than a decade of experience in Asia-Pacific financial/media industries. Image: Reuters