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📎 WarMonitor

🌍❌🐣 Global fertility rates fall below the replacement rate for the first time

A new paper called "Terra Incognita: The Economics of a Shrinking World" by Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde of the University of Pennsylvania and Patrick Norrick of Northwestern University, prepared for the Annual Review of Economics and circulated this month, concluded: "As of 2026, humanity is likely below replacement fertility. That has never happened before, not in wars or pandemics."

The replacement rate is usually quoted as 2.1 births per woman, which is the figure for a rich country with low child mortality; globally, the authors put it nearer 2.20 to take into account the higher mortality rates in poor countries - and the world's own fertility rate is now at roughly that level. The UN's central projection still has the crossing two decades away.

If Fernandez-Villaverde and Norrick are right, world population peaks at about 9bn around 2056 and then falls, "first slowly, then fast". The UN's medium variant has it rising to about 10.3bn into the mid-2080s. That is not a rounding difference; it is thirty years and 1.3bn people, and it is the difference between a problem for someone else's career and a problem for this one.

Their evidence is that the decline has stopped being a rich-world story. Fitting a single-factor model to 236 countries since 1950, the authors find the common component peaked in 1978; what is driving fertility down now is country-specific, and of those country trends 219 are negative and not one has levelled off. The steepest falls are in low- and middle-income countries and among poorer, less-educated women - the groups every projection assumed would keep the average up. In recent data, 37 countries recorded about 1.65mn fewer births than the UN had projected, a shortfall of 9.3%.

No standard explanation fits. The authors run through several candidates - income, housing costs, childcare, women's education, urbanisation - and conclude none accounts for the pattern, offering instead a conjecture: modernity itself, which makes a third child expensive and childlessness cheap. IntelliNews has tracked the same phenomenon through the baby bust that crept up on everyone and the demographic point of no return as the number of women of child-bearing age is now in decline.

🔗 https://www.intellinews.com/global-fertility-rates-fall-below-the-replacement-rate-for-the-first-time-463085/