from TCW
FERTILITY rates have plummeted worldwide over the past six decades, leading experts to predict dire consequences as the downward trend continues. Three-quarters of the world’s population live in countries where fertility rates are at or below the replacement level. Legalised abortion has led to dramatic falls in birth rates, in the West and elsewhere. These are the key findings of a in depth report published by the Epoch Times earlier this week entitled: An Impending Population Crisis? World Fertility Rate Hits 60-Year Low.
Continued low fertility rates will cause ‘a gradual implosion of the world’s economy as the population ages and dies’, said Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute is reported as saying.
‘This will not occur overnight, of course but once it is well underway it will be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse course.’
Fertility rates (the average number of children born to a woman in her lifetime), the article explains, are different from birth rates (the number of live births per 1,000 people in a population over a given period), although the terms are related and often used interchangeably. Countries with low fertility rates are also likely to have low birth rates.
Macroeconomist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde called low fertility rates ‘the true economic challenge of our time’, in a February report for the American Enterprise Institute.
In 1960, the average woman bore four or five children in her lifetime. By 2023, that number had halved to 2.2, approaching 2.1, the replacement level for a population to reproduce by the same number.
In July, the US Census Bureau projected that the world’s population will reach 8.1 billion this year from three billion in 1960.