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DEMOGRAPHY Human population and the future of the world
Today less than 20 percent of the world’s people live in a country with high fertility. Population numbers and trends determine the pathways to global prosperity.
By Shripad Tuljapurkar and Wenyun Zuo Shripad Tuljapurkar is Dean and Virginia Morrison Professor of Population Studies at Stanford University and Wenyun Zuo is Research Scientist
Population numbers and age distributions today are vastly different than they were 50 years ago. Today, less than 20 percent of the world’s people live in a country with high fertility, down from nearly 75 percent in 1975. High fertility is defined as a Total Fertility Rate (TFR) above 3 — the average number of children a woman would have over her lifetime at current rates. By 2018, TFR was below the replacement level of 2.1 in over 42 percent of the world — a surprise. There was a modest convergence in fertility across countries as the spread in TFR between any two countries fell from about 4 in 1975 to 2 in 2018. A different fertility decline has happened in many rich industrialized countries, several of which, like Italy, have, or soon will have, falling populations. Analyses of these fertility declines and their causes show that women’s status has increased as rates of marriage and childbearing have decreased. An increase in women’s education has a strong positive correlation with GDP per capita. Women’s participation in the labor force has increased in many countries but also depends on sociocultural factors. These improvements are likely to drive changes that lead to low fertility. Longer lives As recently as 1900 in many countries, including the currently wealthy, it was common that 20 percent of newborns would die in the first year of life. Infant mortality (IMR) has since fallen dramatically in rich countries to about 0.5 percent, and in the rapidly growing economies to about 3 percent. There has been progress across the world: in 1975, only 4 percent of the world’s people lived in places with an IMR of 5 percent or lower; by 2018 that amount increased to almost 41 percent. But many poorer countries still have relatively high IMRs. In light of these differences, the UN in 2015 declared that substantial declines in IMR by 2030 are a Sustainable Development Goal. Progress, however, remains uneven and slow, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, due to factors including low GDP growth, limited institutional capabilities, conflicts and absence of good governance.
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