According to the UN, with longer life expectancy and decreased childhood mortality, the global fertility rate in all countries is likely to begin declining toward the end of the century.
This week, South Korea reported that, as of 2023, the country’s fertility rate has dropped to just 0.72 births per woman, shattering its record.
Without migration, a population replenishes itself at about 2.1 each generation.
According to the United Nations Population Division, Asia, particularly countries like South Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong, leads the world in having the oldest populations.
According to Katharina Buchholz of Statista, South Korea was one of the few countries in the world with a fertility rate below one even in 2021, as evidenced by the accompanying map that compares data between nations.
The birth rate in Japan stayed at 1.26 despite the country’s announcement on Tuesday of a 5% drop in births to a historic low of 758,631. This puts the nation among the roughly 90 places where immigration is not driving population growth. Numerous countries from Southeast Asia, the Americas, and Europe are also included in this group. The majority of the more industrialized nations experiencing a decline in fertility can be attributed to increased access to contraception and the increasing number of educated and employed women.
The situation is different in the developing world, where increased fertility rates are contributing to the ongoing global population rise. Niger, a nation in West Africa, has the highest fertility rate in the world in 2021—6.8—according to the World Bank. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, and Chad came in second and third, respectively. 31 of the 33 nations worldwide where women gave birth to four or more children on average that year were in Africa.
By 2021, women’s lifetime childbearing had more than half decreased to 2.3 from an average of 5.3 in 1963. Around 150 percent of the world’s population increased during that time, from 3.2 billion to 7.9 billion. Longer life expectancy and decreased childhood mortality are linked to the fact that populations have continued to grow despite declining worldwide fertility.
The UN predicts that while the world population is likely to begin declining toward the end of the century, global fertility will reach the minimum replacement level of 2.1 by the middle of the century.
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