Why are birth rates lower in developed countries

Declining fertility rates are a trend around the world. Since 1950, the total global fertility rate has dropped by half, according to The Lancet's comprehensive Global Burden of Disease Study. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) points out that the U.S. fertility rate has been falling steadily since 2008, and has never returned to its recorded peak in 1958.

Inhaltsverzeichnis Show

Traditional religious values
Traditional Masculinity
Dependency Theory

The fertility rate is defined as the average number of living children born to a woman who survives her reproductive years (ages 15–49). It is influenced by multiple factors, including economic and social change. The total fertility rate (TFR) is considered a measure of population growth. Globally, the population is growing while fertility rates continue to decline. This is because population growth is calculated based on fertility rate, death rate and migration.

But what are the primary reasons for declining fertility rates? The scientific community is not completely in agreement, but the following factors have a resounding impact.

1. Improved Educational Opportunities for Women

According to Oxford University's Our World in Data project, the social empowerment of women, particularly through increased education, has been shown to decrease fertility rates. Increased education also contributes positively to other factors that decrease fertility rates, such as higher use of contraception, better childhood health and women's participation in the workforce.

2. Lower Child Mortality

Historically, high child mortality — including infant deaths and deaths by early childhood illnesses — kept population growth low and fertility rates high. As child mortality rates have declined (dramatically in some countries) fertility rates have fallen.

3. Better Access to Contraception and Family Planning Advice

For some areas of the world, the sharpest declines in fertility rates have come from the introduction of safe, reliable access to contraception. This may include confidential access if local cultural norms or family members impede a woman's right to access birth control. The increased availability of sexual health education and family planning resources has also impacted fertility rates.

4. Increasing Societal Prosperity

U.S. News and World Report notes that high-income countries have experienced a steeper decline in fertility than low-income countries, but it's unclear whether confounding factors, such as increased educational opportunities, are responsible for this correlation.

A higher level of education fosters more prosperity and a lower number of children, according to The World Bank. However, Our World In Data speculates whether other factors such as career aspirations and changing cultural pressures around marriage might contribute to parents choosing to have fewer children — or none at all. People in many wealthier regions are getting married later in life, pursuing careers and choosing to have children later, according to The Week.

Predicting the Consequences of Lower Fertility Rates

With an aging population and a shrinking pool of younger workers, some analysts worry economic growth will decline in a way that will be difficult to overcome. Initially, as the birth rate declines, the economy grows; but when a tipping point is reached and fertility rates continue to fall, the imbalance between elderly and working-age people becomes unsustainable.

There may be beneficial impacts to the environment if the burden of population growth eases, but how that will happen is still unclear. Economists and population analysts don't yet fully understand how the social and economic consequences will play out.

Even though we’ve looked at theories suggesting high birth rates may not be a problem, it remains a fact that birth rates are higher in the developing world. Here are some theories why this is the case…

The first set of theories below come from a Modernisation Theory perspective

Traditional religious values

Paul Harrison’s inside the third world (1990) points out the highest growth rates are in Muslim and Roman Catholic countries. He argues that strictly religious cultures fear that using contraception would encourage promiscuity. Both Islamic leaders and Catholic leaders counsel against the use of contraception in the developing world.

Traditional Masculinity

Many men in Latin America feel that using contraception would compromise their masculinity

Patriarchy

Patriarchy is the norm in many developing countries, which excludes women from decision making processes. In some traditional cultures women do not have a say in whether they have children and are effectively seen as the property of men. Introducing contraception would give women more control over their bodies and effectively undermine the patriarchal basis of power in those countries. Thus it is a combination of traditional religious beliefs and patriarchy that contribute to high population growth.

Dependency Theory

Adamson (1986) argues that poverty causes overpopulation rather than internal cultural values causing overpopulation and then overpopulation causing poverty. He argues that there are several reasons why it is rational for poor people to have lots of children.

In developing countries children are seen as economic assets because of the increased income they can generate. This is especially true where the government does not punish parents for not sending their children to school.
Children provide old age care to parents in developing countries where there is no social welfare/ pensions
In areas of high infant mortality, it makes sense to have 5 or more children as this increases the likelihood of at least one of them surviving to adulthood.

Conversely, in developed countries with higher standards of living it costs much more money to bring up children which discourages large families. This was the case in the UK in the 19th century.

SignPostin

Americans have been having fewer babies for a several years now, especially since the Great Recession. The CDC report that came out earlier this month showing that fertility rates are at record lows didn’t surprise economists or demographers. But experts do have mixed opinions about how governments should be dealing with this and whether it’s a problem at all.

The issue at hand, according to demographer and professor of sociology at University of Pennsylvania, Hans-Peter Kohler, isn’t that a declining rate is inherently a bad thing. “What we care about is if we’re reproducing the next generation,” enough so that we’re meeting the demographic replacement rate, which is needed to sustain high living standards and a high quality of life, Kohler explained. This trend is not just an American one, though. It’s shared by countries that have family-friendly policies, like Denmark and Norway. Some reasons Kohler cites for declining rates: fewer teenage pregnancies, parents investing more in fewer children, and parents attaining a higher education.

We continue to explore this topic in our mini-series on fertility and how it’s linked to the economy. Below is an edited transcript of host Sabri’s Ben-Achour’s conversation with Kohler.

Sabri Ben-Achour: So fertility rates in the U.S. have been going down for the past three years. People expected fertility to increase as we recovered from the Great Recession. How does the U.S. compare in this way with other developed countries?

Hans-Peter Kohler: So, fertility rates actually in the U.S. some time ago were exceptionally high, and then surrounding the, kind of, Great Recession, that changed dramatically. The U.S. had this kind of streak of declining fertility rates, and in recent reports, getting to these historic low fertility rates. Now that, on the other hand, is broadly shared with many other countries, including some countries that invest heavily into families and family-friendly policies, such as Denmark and Norway. Surprisingly [they] also had declining fertility rates in the last few years, and the, kind of, end of the recession hasn’t gone necessary along with the recovery of fertility rates, despite the fact that declining fertility rates were often attributed to the consequences of the Recession, including increased jobs, uncertainty and higher unemployment.

Ben-Achour: So, in a sense the U.S. has finally caught up with many other high-income countries in having this issue with fertility, with birth rates?

Kohler: On one hand, what we care [about] infertility is, kind of, reproducing the next generation and have a demographic trajectory that allows us to sustain high living standards, high quality of life and so forth. And if this is our societal goal, it’s not clear that this demographic replacement rate is the necessary benchmark by which we should measure fertility and say that this ought to be the societal, desirable outcome. So, it might well be that that these lower rates of fertility are driven in part by declining fertility at very young ages — teenage pregnancies and so forth are declining. And arguably this is a societal, very good development because these early pregnancies may have been associated with negative life cycle outcomes. One extent is that individuals have learned that there are multiple things one can do in early life. Having children is one of them. So, young individuals, couples start delaying fertility in order to attain more education, get more labor market experience and so forth, and may have some or all of these children at a later point in life. And arguably this is a positive trend as well. And finally, you know, individuals might be shifting from [a] number of children to having fewer children but investing more in them, so having higher levels of human capital and maintaining our quality of life. That, ultimately, might be the most important aspect.

Ben-Achour: Why is it that the highest-income countries have the lowest birth rates?

Kohler: What parents would like to achieve is not necessarily a certain number of children, right? They want to achieve parental happiness, so you want to do a bunch of things in life that make you happy and satisfied, and having children might be an important component thereof but not necessarily having many children. There’s a range of pressures that have parents shift away from [a] number of children to investing more in their children — higher levels of early childhood investment, higher levels of education, tertiary education — and these investments require parental resources, time and money that now go into investing into a smaller number of children, as compared to having relatively many children.

Ben-Achour: So let me ask a very simple question: Is the decline in fertility in the U.S., the decline in fertility in some high-income countries — is that even a problem?

Kohler: I would say at the level we are observing it in the U.S. it is not a problem. If the U.S. had South Korean, Japanese or Italian fertility rates, arguably, the pressure to do something about this might be higher.

Ben-Achour: When we look at other countries that maybe do have a problem with their birth rates, first, why is it a problem for them, and how have they gone about dealing with that problem?

Kohler: So, there is [an] important difference in the fertility levels we observe in, say, the United States or Denmark or Norway or some other countries that are for sure below replacement, they are well below replacement. But they are not what we have referred to [as] lowest low fertility rates below 1.3 children per woman, where the long-term consequences would be a lot higher. Many of the countries that have very low fertility also have much lower levels of immigration, and immigration is obviously one of the adjustment mechanisms by which countries respond to low fertility. So, a lot of policies that on a superficial level may sound like appealing, like providing financial incentives for having children and so forth, but our media campaigns that one should have children. And mostly they don’t work. So, these set of policies for which there’s some evidence that they work are pertain to increasing compatibility of parenting and labor force participation policies, increasing early childhood investment through daycare, daycare provision that allows mothers also to return to the labor market relatively quickly. For these type of policies, there is some evidence that they might actually work and help, kind of, revert this trend or sustain, at least, a moderately below-replacement fertility.

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