WUNRN
Highly Developed Nations See Rise in Fertility
Prosperity's
Effect on Birthrate Changes
Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
August 10, 2009
For decades, the rate at which women were having babies in many of the world's most highly developed countries slowly declined.
While the trend cheered some environmentalists worried about overpopulation, it stoked increasing concern among policymakers, demographers and social scientists about the long-term impact on societies as their populations aged and sometimes began to shrink.
Now, however, new research has produced the first glimmer of hope that economic prosperity may not be linked to an inexorable decline in fertility. The new analysis has found that in many countries, once a nation achieves an especially high level of development, women appear to start having more babies again.
"This is something like a light at the end of the tunnel for some of these countries whose populations were on the path to decline," said Hans-Peter Kohler, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania who helped conduct the research. "We project a more optimistic future where fertility will go up, which reduces fears of rapid population decline and rapid aging."
Other researchers praised the new analysis as a milestone with potentially far-reaching political and social implications.
"This is very significant," said Shripad Tuljapurkar, a biology and population studies professor at Stanford University, who wrote a commentary accompanying the new research in the scientific journal Nature. "This debate has been going on for some time about these amazingly low fertility rates in some of these countries. It's been a classic policy quandary that people tend to sit around and shake their heads and worry about."
The concern has focused on a nation's "fertility rate," which is generally considered desirable by demographers and sociologists when it hovers around the "replacement rate" -- when the average number of babies born to each woman is about two. That means a country is producing enough young people to replace and support aging workers without population growth being so high that it taxes national resources.
Throughout the 20th century, the fertility rate has generally fallen as economic prosperity has risen, sometimes far below the replacement rate in some of the world's most highly developed nations, such as Japan, South Korea, Germany, Spain and Italy.
"There was a consensus that as countries develop, become richer and provide more education, that fertility would know only one trend -- and that trend was downward," Kohler said. "This raises a broad range of concerns. Systems such as pension systems would not be sustainable. A rapid decline in the labor force could result in an economic decline and a loss of competitiveness and perhaps a loss of innovation."
Resistant to the notion of replenishing their populations through immigration, some countries, such as Sweden and Italy, have become so concerned about their stubbornly low fertility rates that they have tried offering women financial incentives to have more babies, without significant success.
To explore whether economic development is necessarily linked to falling fertility, Kohler and his colleagues examined fertility trends between 1975 and 2005 in 37 of the most developed countries. They used a measure developed by the United Nations known as the human development index (HDI), which combines income data with other measures of advancement, such as longevity and education levels.
Fertility rates did tend to decline as a nation's HDI rose, the analysis showed. But for 18 of 26 countries that crossed a certain threshold of development -- an HDI of at least .9 -- their fertility rates began to rise again.
"This basically shattered this notion that as countries develop, fertility would only decline," Kohler said. "Quite to the contrary, in the very advanced societies, fertility may go up as countries get richer and more educated."
The timing of the turnaround varied from country to country. In the United States, for example, the turnaround occurred in the mid 1970s. In Norway, it happened in the early 1980s. In Italy, it was in the early 1990s.
The cause remains unclear. But Kohler speculated that once countries reach a certain level of development, they can afford changes that enable women both to work and have children. Many Scandinavian countries, for example, created generous welfare systems that include free day care. In the United States, women's salaries rose enough to make paying for child care more affordable.
Although the analysis did not specifically examine the impact of immigration on fertility rates, Kohler said other studies indicate that while immigration may play some role in the increases in fertility in countries that reach a high level of development, it would not explain all of it.
"My best guess is that increasingly in these rich countries, the benefits of greater development are flowing more to women," Tuljapurkar said. "Women have more education, and because they have more education and skills they probably find it easier to take a year off and have a baby and pay for the additional costs, and then get back into the labor force."
But others questioned the relationship.
"I don't think the concern about low fertility is over," said S. Philip Morgan, a sociology and international studies professor at Duke University. "There are a lot of things that may have made fertility go back up aside from social and economic development. Suppose there was a growing consensus that having babies was important. It could be an ideological change that could have produced this result. We just don't know."
Kohler acknowledged that there were some exceptions. Japan, for example, continued to experience a decline in fertility despite a high HDI. Kohler said the reason for the outliers remained unclear, but he speculated that stubborn gender inequalities in Japan may create roadblocks to women working and having children.
"In Japan, there's high gender inequality that makes it difficult for women to remain in the labor market once they have children, perhaps because of a lack of daycare and social pressures," he said.
But Canada was another exception with no clear explanation.
Whatever the reason, the trend appears to be working for many countries. The United States recently achieved replacement-rate fertility and some countries, such as Norway and France, are now approaching a replacement rate again. Many countries, such as Italy and Spain, continue to have very low fertility rates. But at least they are headed in the right direction, Kohler said.
"This shows that having families is something that continues to be highly valued in advanced societies. As we become affluent and developed, children are likely to remain an essential part of an individual's life. The family is not necessarily on its way out."
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