By 2050, more than three-quarters of countries will not be born enough children to maintain their population size. And in 2100, only six of the 204 countries and territories in the world (Samoa, Somalia, Tonga, Niger, Chad and Tajikistan) will have fertility rates higher than 2.1 children per woman, which is what guarantees demographic replacement. As a result, at the beginning of the next century, more than half of all babies on the planet will be born in sub-Saharan Africa.
This is clear from research led by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) on past, present and future trends in fertility and births worldwide, published in The Lancet magazine.
Using innovative methods for predicting mortality, fertility, and the factors that affect it, such as educational level, the need for contraceptives, or infant mortality, among others, the authors confirm that “the world is approaching a future of low fertility” and predict that these future trends in fertility and birth rates “will completely reconfigure the global economy and the international balance of power and require the reorganization of societies,” in the words of Natalia V. Bhattacharjee, lead researcher from IHME, an independent global health research center at the University of Washington funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The lead author of the study, Professor Stein Emil Vollset, assures that the world will simultaneously face a baby boom in some countries and a baby bust in others. “As most of the world faces serious challenges to economic growth from a shrinking workforce and the need to care for and support an aging population, many of the poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa will have to “find a way to keep the youngest and fastest growing population on the planet in some of the most politically and economically unstable places, with the most heat stress and with the most limited health systems in the world,” Vollset commented when announcing the study. .
Bhattacharjee, for his part, has insisted that the fact that most of the world is moving towards natural population decline (when the number of deaths exceeds the number of births) has “immense implications”, such as the need to address globally the challenges around immigration and global aid networks because, he says, in the future there will be “fierce competition for migrants to sustain economic growth” in many countries while the baby boom will continue in some countries of Africa that risk a possible humanitarian catastrophe as a result of extreme poverty, lack of health infrastructure and the effects of climate change.
For this reason, and although they admit that there are no miraculous solutions to stop this change in demographic patterns, the researchers ask governments to apply aid and incentives to births that, although they will not increase fertility rates to the replacement level, they will. They believe they can prevent them from falling to extremely low levels. And in countries with high fertility rates such as sub-Saharan countries, the study suggests that efforts focus on accelerating access to modern contraceptives and universal female education.
The director of the Institute of Economics, Geography and Demography of the CSIC, Diego Ramiro, assures that the scenario of general decline in fertility proposed by the IHME researchers is already reflected in the demographic projections of the United Nations or the Vienna Institute of Demography ( IIASA), but it relativizes the intensity of the phenomenon they describe.
“If fertility is falling a lot in some African countries, it is because infant mortality is also falling and families no longer need to have so many children for one to survive,” he exemplifies.
And remember that previous IHME population projections have already raised significant criticism from the community dedicated to demographic research “because a more sophisticated analysis is needed than the one they do for their estimates, and it doesn’t make much sense to make projections 75 years into the future because “The probabilities of failure are very high since many things can happen that affect fertility.”
On the other hand, the CSIC researcher assures that the social policies proposed by the IHME study to maintain or increase birth rates are those that have been applied for many years in the Nordic countries and their fertility rates are below the replacement level.
