[LINK] "Making Babies Makes a Comeback"
Bloomberg View's Noah Smith makes the argument that the fertility J-curve might yet lead to a global fertility recovery.
Japan’s government mistakenly forecast that fertility would bounce back…until 1997. Somewhere around the turn of the century, the government wised up, and realized that the fertility rate was not about to bounce back. If you look at the graph -- as many of the pundits heaping scorn on Japan’s government apparently did not -- you will see that the forecasts have been too pessimistic for more than a decade now. Fertility rates bottomed out at 1.26 children per woman in 2005, and have been rising since -- despite the sharp recession and natural disasters that happened in the meantime. The modest rise has been sustained, and the fertility rate has bounced back to 1.43 in 2013 -- a 13.5 percent rise from its low.
Now, a 13.5 percent rise isn't going to save Japan from a baby bust -- the rate would have to rise by an additional 47 percent in order to reach replacement level, the level that generates long-term population stability. Population decline has already set in, causing economic and social difficulties.
But the slight rise is encouraging, and hints that falling fertility might not be an inescapable death sentence for developed countries. Japan’s experience is part of a trend that has been appearing all across the rich world in the last few years -- fertility is rising a bit. The first study to discover this intriguing phenomenon was published in 2009 in Nature by demographers Mikko Myrskylä, Hans-Peter Kohler and Francesco Billari. They write:
Here we show, using new cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of the total fertility rate and the human development index (HDI), a fundamental change in the well-established negative relationship between fertility and development as the global population entered the twenty-first century. Although development continues to promote fertility decline at low and medium HDI levels, our analyses show that at advanced HDI levels, further development can reverse the declining trend in fertility. The previously negative development-fertility relationship has become J-shaped, with the HDI being positively associated with fertility among highly developed countries.
Japan was one of the only exceptions they found. Now, it too has joined the trend. In some countries, such as France, Sweden and Norway, fertility has almost climbed back to replacement levels, after dipping far below it for decades. In the U.S., fertility briefly surged above the replacement rate for a few years before drifting back to just underneath it. And in New Zealand, fertility is now at the replacement level.
Japan’s government mistakenly forecast that fertility would bounce back…until 1997. Somewhere around the turn of the century, the government wised up, and realized that the fertility rate was not about to bounce back. If you look at the graph -- as many of the pundits heaping scorn on Japan’s government apparently did not -- you will see that the forecasts have been too pessimistic for more than a decade now. Fertility rates bottomed out at 1.26 children per woman in 2005, and have been rising since -- despite the sharp recession and natural disasters that happened in the meantime. The modest rise has been sustained, and the fertility rate has bounced back to 1.43 in 2013 -- a 13.5 percent rise from its low.
Now, a 13.5 percent rise isn't going to save Japan from a baby bust -- the rate would have to rise by an additional 47 percent in order to reach replacement level, the level that generates long-term population stability. Population decline has already set in, causing economic and social difficulties.
But the slight rise is encouraging, and hints that falling fertility might not be an inescapable death sentence for developed countries. Japan’s experience is part of a trend that has been appearing all across the rich world in the last few years -- fertility is rising a bit. The first study to discover this intriguing phenomenon was published in 2009 in Nature by demographers Mikko Myrskylä, Hans-Peter Kohler and Francesco Billari. They write:
Here we show, using new cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of the total fertility rate and the human development index (HDI), a fundamental change in the well-established negative relationship between fertility and development as the global population entered the twenty-first century. Although development continues to promote fertility decline at low and medium HDI levels, our analyses show that at advanced HDI levels, further development can reverse the declining trend in fertility. The previously negative development-fertility relationship has become J-shaped, with the HDI being positively associated with fertility among highly developed countries.
Japan was one of the only exceptions they found. Now, it too has joined the trend. In some countries, such as France, Sweden and Norway, fertility has almost climbed back to replacement levels, after dipping far below it for decades. In the U.S., fertility briefly surged above the replacement rate for a few years before drifting back to just underneath it. And in New Zealand, fertility is now at the replacement level.