By Brianna Abbott. To Read the Full Story. Subscribe Sign In. Continue reading your article with a WSJ membership. This has led to inadequate funding and concerns about inequity. The need for private assisted conception due to lack of public funding may eventually lead to only the rich benefiting from fertility treatment. This will lead to long term social inequality.
The state should fund the mild IVF treatments which are safer, less costly and have comparable success rates to the standard downregulation protocols Heijnen et al. This will improve access to fertility treatment for the socially deprived.
It involves sustaining the current family structure for the creation of future generations. It should therefore be funded not just by the Department of Health, but by a dedicated department within the government which addresses this subject in the short and the long term in the best interests of the families, societies and nations.
Reproduction is important in order to achieve a balance of family life, diversity, socio-economic equality and progress across communities. It is the only area that spreads not only through a cross-section of society but also longitudinally through generations.
There is a need for collaboration between individual governments, the EEC, United Nations and the World Health Organization, to take this strategy forward. Early and cost-effective assessment of fertility problems and assisted reproduction should be provided as part of public health care. A tailored and sensitive programme could enhance the effect in a multicultural population.
This could help couples plan an early parenthood. The government should prioritise the provision of safe, mild and cost-effective assisted reproduction treatments ART with single embryo transfer SET so that more treatment cycles could be offered within the available health budget. This would save costs associated with drugs, hospital admissions for OHSS and multiple pregnancies.
The role of immigration trends in improving birth rates and its long-term effect need to be evaluated. A separate department must be established to promote family life. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Facts Views Vis Obgyn. Author information Copyright and License information Disclaimer.
On the right-hand side of the chart we see countries where women have fewer than 3 children — in these countries the fertility rate had declined already in the decades before. As we will see below fertility rates were high in all countries in the distant past. And other countries maintained very high fertility levels. In Yemen, the fertility rate was 8. The global average was still close to 4 children per woman. Since then the world has changed substantially.
The blue line shows how. Globally, the fertility rate has fallen to 2. We also see convergence in fertility rates: the countries that already had low fertility rates in the s only slightly decreased fertility rates further, while many of the countries that had the highest fertility back then saw a rapid reduction of the number of children per woman. Comparing the red, orange and blue lines also makes it possible to see the change in single countries: In Iran for example, the fertility rate in was 6.
In Thailand chart here , the fertility rate in was 6. I have also made a second version of this chart where I included the projections for the 21st century. The UN expects global fertility to fall further in most countries so that the global fertility rate rate will be just below 2 children per woman by the end of the century.
The decline of the fertility rate is one of the most fundamental social changes that happened in human history. It is therefore especially surprising how very rapidly this transition can indeed happen. This visualization shows the speed of the decline of fertility rates. It took Iran only 10 years for fertility to fall from more than 6 children per woman to fewer than 3 children per woman.
China made this transition in 11 years — before the introduction of the one-child policy. We also see from the chart that the speed with which countries can make the transition to low fertility rates has increased over time.
In the 19th century it took the United Kingdom 95 years and the US 82 years to reduce fertility from more than 6 to less than 3.
This is a pattern that we see often in development: those countries that first experience social change take much longer for transitions than those who catch up later: Countries that were catching up increased life expectancy much faster, they reduced child mortality more quickly and were able to grow their incomes much more rapidly. The UN data shown above only shows the change from onwards.
By then the richest countries had already experienced substantial decreases of the fertility rate and it would be a mistake to believe that these countries did not see high fertility rates in the past. This table shows fertility rates in Europe before Back then one woman gave on average birth to 4. The population of a society does not increase when every woman is replaced on average by two children.
As the tables presents fertility rates when the population in these countries did not yet grow rapidly we can infer that on average 2.
The following map shows the estimates published by Gapminder from the year onwards for countries where data is available. Fertility rates were estimated to be very high across the entire planet until very recently. Here we show only data backed up with published estimates within the academic literature or United Nations Population Division.
Gapminder also publishes long-run estimates for all countries — but stresses that these estimates come with high uncertainty. The full dataset can be found here. The stacked area chart shows the number of births globally. In , 97 million children were born, in the world saw million births — these are , births every day. In addition to the total fertility rate a second commonly used measure is the birth rate. The birth rate is expressed as the annual number of births per 1, people in the population.
Below I will review both the theoretical explanations of how each of these aspects impacted the number of children women have and also present the empirical research that investigates these explanations.
What makes precise accounting difficult is that the different explanations of declining fertility are not mutually exclusive. The level of education in a society — of women in particular — is one of the most important predictors for the number of children families have. We should look at the theory. The choice for having a child is a question of opportunity costs and education changes them.
Much of the theoretical work in recent decades on how families decide how many children they want rests on the models of the economist Gary Becker. Prize, in this framework, is thought of as a much broader concept then just the monetary costs parents incur.
It includes the direct costs of the child — much of which are monetary costs, such as the costs for childcare or schooling for example —, but it also includes the indirect costs such as the opportunity cost in time that is needed for pregnancy and upbringing of the child.
In the framework of Becker it can be understood why improving the education of women leads women to want fewer children. There is evidence, which we discuss in our entry on child mortality , that better education of mothers is having a positive impact on better health and lower mortality of the children. Further below I will review the evidence that lower child in turn leads to a decrease of the total fertility rate.
Taken together these two pieces of evidence suggest that better education of women reinforces the direct effect it has on fertility through an additional indirect effect via better child health. Education is also important for the knowledge and use of contraceptives and the ability of better educated women to reduce the gap between the desired and the actual number of children is an additional positive feedback effect by which better education reduces the number of children.
Chicoine finds evidence for the importance of education in this regard. The shortest loop of positive feedback runs through fertility itself. Education is not only reducing fertility, lower fertility also allows for better education.
Better education of women thereby reinforces itself, both within as well as across generations. Evidence for this two-way reinforcing relationship can be found in the historical transition to lower fertility in Prussia which was studied by Becker, Cinnirella and Woessmann The effect that better education has on lower fertility can reinforce itself also over subsequent generations.
As the fertility rate declines the education system faces smaller and smaller cohorts of school children for which it can better provide. And additionally parents with fewer children also have more opportunities to nurture and support each child.
This is a kind of demographic dividend on education. In both historical and contemporary episodes of declining fertility researchers have found strong evidence that social norms are important in reducing the number of children that parents desire — I will present some of this evidence below.
Education seems to be a key prerequisite for these changes to take hold. If the view has emerged in, say, Kerala or Tamil Nadu that a happy family in the modern age is a small family, much discussion and debate have gone into the formation of these perspectives. Kerala now has a fertility rate of 1. The high level of literacy of the Kerala population, especially female literacy, which is higher than that of every province of China, has greatly contributed to making such social and political dialogues possible more on this in the next chapter.
Studies look at this relationship on both the social and on the individual level. While some studies achieve to only show a statistical correlation , others also establish a causal relationship between rising education and a decreasing number of children. Each arrow in this plot shows for one country how the average number of children per woman on the y-axis and the years of education of women in the reproductive age on the x-axis have changed.
What we see in the arrow-plot is that when women had on average fewer than 2 years of education back in the s the fertility rate was between 5 and 8 children. Six decades later most women are much better educated and often have 8 or more years of education on average: As we would expect from the theory above this meant that they have much fewer children, where women have more than 8 years of education the fertility rate is less than 4 children per woman and mostly lower than 2.
Sixty years later when Iranian women had on average 9 years of schooling they had on average 1. In countries where women today still have only little access to education the fertility rates are still high. In Niger, the country with the highest reported fertility rate in , women in the reproductive age had only 1. This is why, if you are concerned about population growth, you should be an advocate for giving women access to education.
Several studies go one stop further and are not only looking at two variables, but instead manage to additionally control for possibly confounding variables. These macro studies are often especially interesting because they can study historical changes where micro data — on individual families — is not available.
Becker, Cinnirella, and Woessmann 9 study Prussia before the demographic transition in the 19th century and find that higher education of women is associated with lower fertility. After controlling for several other factors and after additionally employing instrumental-variable techniques the authors suggest that this relationship is indeed causal.
Micro studies: Women who are better educated tend to have fewer children Micro studies are not aggregating the measured aspects on the societal level — such as the country level — and instead allow to track the circumstances and behaviors of individuals. This is particularly helpful in our question because it is so difficult to disentangle the causal relationship between fertility and education — while better education is possibly related to lower fertility, it would also be reasonable to expect that the other way around, lower fertility increases the opportunities for women to receive better education and that this is the reason we see a correlation.
Micro studies can shed light on these seemingly intractable problem, particularly when they are set up as randomized evaluations. Duflo, Kremer, and Dupas 11 conducted such a large randomized evaluation in western Kenya over a period of 7 years in which they found that subsidies to education decreased the rate of pregnancies in adolescent girls.
Because we can study the effect of the policy intervention in this evaluation, we can see that the relation in question is not driven by an impact of the number of children on the education of women. Luke Chicoine 12 studied the impact of another policy change, this time in Kenya, that lengthened primary school by one year from onwards and finds that the additional education of women lowered the number of children they had.
The author emphasizes that the increased early use of modern contraceptives of better educated women was instrumental to make this reduction of fertility possible. Brievora and Duflo 13 studied the link between education and the number of children women want by investigating the impact of a school construction program in Indonesia between and The authors again find that a better education of women is associated with a lower number of children.
The evidence from these micro studies is exceptionally clear and suggests that increasing education for women is indeed leading to a decrease of the fertility rate. In this visualization I show the evidence for all the countries in the world where the fertility rate is still above 5 children per woman. In these countries too it is true that more highly educated women have substantially fewer children. Those mothers with secondary education have typically fewer than 5 and often fewer than 4 children.
Those with higher tertiary education have always fewer than 4 and sometimes even fewer than 2 children. This change is so closely linked to the rising education of women discussed before that it is indeed impossible to separate from that. The theoretical argument for why women want fewer fewer children as their chances in the labor market are increasing can be explained with reference to the same framework proposed by Gary Becker that I laid out above: As women increasingly participate in the labour market their opportunity costs for having children are rising so that they seek to have fewer children.
There is again a two-way relationship: In addition to the reasons to expect that increasing labor force participation of women leads women to have fewer children, it is also obvious to consider that the reverse is true. This two-way-relationship leads to a cycle which can enforce itself: As women decide to have fewer children and are increasingly participating in the labor market they have yet more reason to have fewer children.
Beginning with the industrialization, labor markets underwent historical changes which made the increasing labor force participation of women possible. In the poorer economies of the past the huge majority of workers were working in the agricultural sector. Work on the farms was physically extremely demanding and men had a strong comparative advantage in this labour market over women.
With the shift away from agriculture towards manufacturing and services and an increasing importance of education due to technological change this comparative advantage of men was eroded and over the long-run the labour force participation of women increased. In nearly every contemporary society, people who are more educated and have higher incomes have fewer children than those who are less educated and have lower incomes. In , U. Often these differences arise from religious beliefs and cultural norms.
Immigrants often maintain the childbearing patterns of their homelands when they arrive in a new country. For example, fertility rates for Arabs in Israel and Asians in Russia remain higher than average for the country.
But over time, immigrants and their children tend to incorporate the fertility patterns of their adopted country. In , the TFR was 1. Resource Library. Why Is the U. Birth Rate Declining?
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