Why fertility and birth rates are falling - The Global Story podcast, BBC World Service — Transcript

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1. 0:00Hello, I'm Lucy Hockings. From the BBC World Service,
2. 0:03this is The Global Story. The global population is growing,
3. 0:08and it's not expected to peak until well into the second half of this century.
4. 0:14But the number of children that people are having
5. 0:17is actually decreasing around the world.
6. 0:21From a persistent cost of living crisis
7. 0:23to the rapid cultural change of this hyper-digital era,
8. 0:26the factors fuelling this trend aren't easy to define.
9. 0:31As more and more countries see their populations age,
10. 0:34some fear unsustainable pressure will mount
11. 0:37on the critical social infrastructure which holds communities together.
12. 0:41So is it possible to plan ahead to limit the impact of falling fertility rates,
13. 0:47and are there ways that societies could even benefit from it long term?
14. 0:59With me today is the BBC's population correspondent, Stephanie Hegarty.
15. 1:03Hi, Stephanie. Hi. Thanks for having me.
16. 1:05You've been studying population trends for a long time now.
17. 1:08Have you ever seen a shift like this? The interesting thing
18. 1:10about population is we focus on it when something seems dramatic.
19. 1:16But actually the changes are quite incremental.
20. 1:19We have been seeing this serious acceleration in growth,
21. 1:24um, and in fertility rates and everything.
22. 1:27And now we're just that's starting to slow down.
23. 1:29So we are in a time of great change.
24. 1:31But it's interesting because we report these things and
25. 1:33this is our business, right? In news, we report things when there is change.
26. 1:36But what I've always found fascinating about fertility is,
27. 1:40and population is, it is kind of slow.
28. 1:43You know, it is incremental in the grand scheme of things.
29. 1:46But we are talking about a decline in fertility rates in this episode.
30. 1:50But actually the global population itself is growing
31. 1:53and it's growing quickly. So can you put that into context?
32. 1:56So I was thinking about this the other day and I, I think
33. 1:59maybe one of the easiest ways to describe it is my family, right?
34. 2:02My mum had four kids and each of us has had fewer than that.
35. 2:05My brother's had three.
36. 2:06I have one, my other brother has one, my sister has none.
37. 2:09So each of us have had fewer children than my mum.
38. 2:12But there's still five grandchildren in our family.
39. 2:14So our family is growing and the dynamics on a global level are similar.
40. 2:17But there's also another dynamic that's going on,
41. 2:21which is in certain countries you have the dynamic, like my family,
42. 2:25and then in others, fertility rates aren't declining as dramatically.
43. 2:29So there's a handful of countries
44. 2:31where the population is still growing quite rapidly.
45. 2:33Is this Africa and Asia? Most of them are in Africa. Yeah.
46. 2:36And big countries like Nigeria, Ethiopia and Egypt,
47. 2:40but then also Pakistan, the Philippines.
48. 2:43And they're going to contribute hugely to the growth in the global population.
49. 2:47But they are the minority.
50. 2:48So by 2050, I think three quarters of the countries in the world
51. 2:52will have a declining population and then some will still be growing.
52. 2:56Nigeria is one of the fastest growing countries in the world,
53. 2:58but its fertility rate,
54. 3:00so the number of children each woman is having, is declining.
55. 3:03So it was six in the 50s, around five now.
56. 3:06So all over the world, this generation is having
57. 3:09fewer children than our parents.
58. 3:11So can we say that by the end of the century, is this fair,
59. 3:14that the overwhelming majority of countries actually
60. 3:17are not going to be able to sustain their populations? Absolutely.
61. 3:19And the global population by the end of this century will also be declining.
62. 3:22Between 2060 and 2080, it's predicted that the global population will top out
63. 3:26at about nine or ten billion and start declining then.
64. 3:30And then more specifically, Stephanie, what do we know
65. 3:32about fertility rates in areas where the population is growing fastest?
66. 3:37So they're still declining, but just not as fast.
67. 3:40So in Europe, you had an average
68. 3:42of about four children in the middle of the century.
69. 3:45Now it's gone down to well below two.
70. 3:47And this magic number is 2.1. So if each couple has 2.1 children
71. 3:51on average, um, it's kind of hard to have point one of a child,
72. 3:54but then the population will sustain itself.
73. 3:57So you need to produce that number to replace yourselves
74. 4:01in the world and countries that are still
75. 4:04on this trajectory of growth, they have a lot more than 2.1.
76. 4:07So, Stephanie, I think everyone knows that it's been a year
77. 4:10of elections, almost around 70,
78. 4:13we've had in 2024. And surely
79. 4:15in most countries, one of the biggest issues has been the cost of living.
80. 4:19And that is surely a factor when people are making decisions
81. 4:22around whether or not to have a child. Absolutely.
82. 4:24I think it's the factor when it comes to, um,
83. 4:28especially in places where populations are,
84. 4:31is already declining. It comes up again and again.
85. 4:33I've spoken to countless people in, um, Japan or South Korea,
86. 4:38and they talk about things like housing, the cost of education. In the UK,
87. 4:42now it costs about £200,000 ($254,000) over a child's lifetime.
88. 4:45That's the cost. I was horrified when I saw that!
89. 4:48And it's incredible that anyone can afford that.
90. 4:50Research came out earlier this year that, uh,
91. 4:53it's surveys where they speak to young people,
92. 4:56Gen Zs and millennials, about their fertility intention.
93. 4:58So they ask, do you intend to have children? If so, how many?
94. 5:01The responses were quite shocking. Almost half
95. 5:04of the people who've never had children said they had no plans to,
96. 5:08and that was profoundly linked to financial insecurity.
97. 5:11So where people felt they were financially insecure, where they felt
98. 5:15they were less well-off than their parents or their parents' generation,
99. 5:18they were much more likely not to want a child
100. 5:21or to think it was unlikely for them to have a child.
101. 5:24And the researchers I spoke to who've been working on these surveys said
102. 5:28it's not that surprising in this country, where you have the age
103. 5:32where you get your first mortgage is creeping right up into the late 30s.
104. 5:36Childcare is famously unaffordable.
105. 5:39And I'm sure, um, people all around the world will understand
106. 5:43the impact that that has on your decision whether or not to have a child.
107. 5:46And, um, housing, we're seeing housing crises not just here in the UK,
108. 5:49but any country that's experiencing mass urbanisation,
109. 5:53we have this problem with housing. And in some of the countries
110. 5:58that are most profoundly affected by fertility decline, like East Asia,
111. 6:03it's the cost of education that they talk about when they discuss
112. 6:06their decision not to have children, or to have fewer children.
113. 6:08And what about
114. 6:09some of the social and cultural impacts?
115. 6:12I mean, there are rapidly changing expectations
116. 6:15of the genders in our society as well.
117. 6:17So that has had a profound impact
118. 6:20and it's been really well studied, especially in East Asia,
119. 6:23where you have some of the highest participation of women
120. 6:26in the workforce and education,
121. 6:29and at the same time, really unequal distribution of work at home.
122. 6:35And I've found this when I've spoken to women in South Korea or Japan
123. 6:41about whether they want to have children or not,
124. 6:43and they see their friends who already have children
125. 6:45really struggling to keep up at work, struggling to keep up with
126. 6:48the long working hours when they're expected to do everything at home.
127. 6:52And for a lot of the women I've spoken to,
128. 6:54they say, I just don't want that lifestyle.
129. 6:57I don't want that life where, um, I've got to work to support my family.
130. 7:02We need two incomes, but I've also got to do everything at home.
131. 7:04Sounds exhausting. No thank you.
132. 7:06What about in countries that have quite progressive paternity leave,
133. 7:09for instance, does that make a difference?
134. 7:11There was a time period where the Scandinavian countries were celebrated
135. 7:15for, um, reducing, kind of battling fertility decline.
136. 7:20So the fertility levels had dropped, but then picked up again.
137. 7:23And this was the 90s and the early 2000s.
138. 7:26And that was always put down to
139. 7:28their really, um, progressive pro-family policies.
140. 7:31So paternity leave being equally shared between parents,
141. 7:34which um again affected this gender divide at home.
142. 7:38So men and women were doing more and more equal share of the,
143. 7:40of the work at home. And also they had very affordable childcare.
144. 7:45But that progress in stopping fertility decline stalled at some point.
145. 7:51And those policies didn't seem to be doing the job anymore.
146. 7:54And that's really confused
147. 7:56demographers and sociologists in Scandinavia.
148. 7:59So it seems like even when you have these really progressive policies,
149. 8:03which I think these sociologists would agree are good for lots of reasons.
150. 8:07So they don't want to say don't do them, but they just they have a limited effect.
151. 8:10I think the profound takeaway is it's just very difficult
152. 8:14once fertility declines to try and challenge it,
153. 8:17and it becomes a social norm to have fewer children.
154. 8:20I've heard lots of discussions about why women would choose not to have children
155. 8:24in terms of what's happening in society and culturally as well.
156. 8:28But how are young men particularly feeling?
157. 8:31There's a difference between having fewer children
158. 8:34and not having any children at all.
159. 8:37There's a, I suppose, a different, um, mindset.
160. 8:40One of the biggest reasons why people don't have children
161. 8:43is because they can't find a partner. That's men or women.
162. 8:46What we're seeing now in Europe, and,
163. 8:49uh, it's likely that other countries are following this trend,
164. 8:53is a situation where it's men of the lowest income who are
165. 8:57most likely to remain childless, and that's involuntarily childless.
166. 9:01So it's not that they decide when they're young they don't have children,
167. 9:04it's that they assume that they will have children.
168. 9:05And then as they get older, it just, it doesn't happen.
169. 9:08So the poorest men are the most likely to end up not having
170. 9:11the children that they wanted.
171. 9:13And part of this is likely this idea called the mating gap,
172. 9:18is a term a sociologist called called Marcia Inhorn coined.
173. 9:22She was doing research on egg freezing, and
174. 9:24she found all the women that she spoke to, the reason
175. 9:29that they were freezing their eggs is because they couldn't find a partner.
176. 9:31She realised that part of the reason they couldn't find a partner is
177. 9:34that they were looking for someone of their level of education or higher,
178. 9:39whereas we have this situation now where in 60% of countries
179. 9:43women are achieving more in education than men.
180. 9:46So if you've got a situation where women are more educated
181. 9:49but less likely to partner with someone who is less well-educated.
182. 9:54There's a pool of men who aren't, uh, eligible, I suppose.
183. 9:59And, Stephanie, there's also lots of conversations
184. 10:01at the moment, it seems, about young men and how they feel
185. 10:04about their place in the world, particularly in the West.
186. 10:07So male malaise describes the idea that young men are struggling
187. 10:12to understand their place in the world as women are empowered.
188. 10:15And that's creating a kind of a gap, a gap in expectation, say,
189. 10:22or a gap in income.
190. 10:25So the gap in expectation could be young men who don't expect that they
191. 10:30should have a 50/50 partnership at home, and women who expect that.
192. 10:34So there is a divergence in values.
193. 10:36And this researcher, Vincent Straub, was saying that is really going to have
194. 10:40a profound effect on fertility.
195. 10:42But more than that, that this generation of struggling men are more likely
196. 10:47to suffer from things like alcoholism or drug addiction.
197. 10:52They're more likely to become prey to these depths
198. 10:56of despair where, you know, depression, anxiety, addiction
199. 11:01and all of those things affect fertility socially,
200. 11:03but also biologically. So he was really concerned,
201. 11:06he is really concerned that we're overlooking this crisis
202. 11:09among young men, and that we're overlooking its impact on fertility.
203. 11:12And, Stephanie, what about how society views children?
204. 11:16Because it feels like that's changed as well, in my lifetime anyway.
205. 11:20So that is at the core of what
206. 11:23sociologists are now seeing in terms of the trends in Europe.
207. 11:28So before, having a child and even getting married was seen
208. 11:32as something you did on the bridge to adulthood,
209. 11:34as you started out and in your life as an adult, you know,
210. 11:38you would get married in your early 20s, as soon as you finished college,
211. 11:41maybe. So it was seen as a cornerstone event, and now it's seen
212. 11:45as a capstone event. So you get married and you have children
213. 11:47once you've achieved all the other things that you want to achieve in life,
214. 11:50you know, once you've arrived at a certain place in your career.
215. 11:54Once you've bought a house, once you've ticked all these boxes.
216. 11:57And that's a profound shift, because people are delaying having a child
217. 12:01until they achieve those things and often aren't achieving those things,
218. 12:05and as a result, aren't having children.
219. 12:07The first thing that people might associate when they think
220. 12:10about low fertility is an ageing population.
221. 12:13Now, why is this such a problem? Well, the way that our societies
222. 12:17or economies are usually structured is that we have a large pool
223. 12:21of working people who pay their taxes, pay into the system,
224. 12:24and that supports, uh, people who need to be looked after, old people
225. 12:28and young people. Where you have an ageing population,
226. 12:31where you have this inverted pyramid, they call it,
227. 12:33so there's a lot of old people, not very many working people,
228. 12:36there's just not enough money going into the system
229. 12:38to support the people who need it.
230. 12:41And that worries governments.
231. 12:43And what about, um, ageing populations and what that means
232. 12:46for just our infrastructure and institutions in society?
233. 12:50In a population that's ageing rapidly, there's going to be a lot of things to pay for.
234. 12:54So social care for older people and health care
235. 12:57for older people, which is expensive.
236. 13:00A lot of our economies are built on this growth model, right?
237. 13:02We have to constantly
238. 13:05have new businesses opening to stimulate this growth.
239. 13:08And if there's no-one to spend money in those businesses,
240. 13:10then they're not going to survive. Economists predict
241. 13:13in a declining population, we will have declining growth.
242. 13:16It's not inevitable. There's a lot of different ways,
243. 13:19different policies that governments could explore, experiment with to
244. 13:22to try and stop that from happening.
245. 13:26But to a certain extent, it is.
246. 13:29If we don't have enough people paying in, then we won't have
247. 13:32this continuous growth that we've been so used to for such a long time.
248. 13:35Well it can't all be bad, though, Stephanie.
249. 13:37I mean, you mentioned earlier the cost of childcare? At the household level,
250. 13:40not having a child is a sensible choice for, you know, economically.
251. 13:45Like we said, it cost £200,000 ($254,000) over the course
252. 13:48of a lifetime to have a child in this country.
253. 13:50And you can save a lot more, you could save a lot more
254. 13:52towards your retirement. You can plan for your retirement.
255. 13:55So at a household level, there are lots of benefits.
256. 13:58It's broadly at the economic level where when we're used to something,
257. 14:02we've been used to something for so long, we have to adapt to change.
258. 14:06And some people argue that that's inevitable and governments
259. 14:09are just going to have to figure out a different way of doing things.
260. 14:11And there are models. In Singapore,
261. 14:14everyone saves for their own future. So you pay into a pot.
262. 14:18It's much more like a private pension scheme, so they don't rely on,
263. 14:22luckily, because they have a declining population, they don't rely
264. 14:25on the working-age people to pay for older people.
265. 14:29But it's a very different system, and transitioning from one
266. 14:31to the other is always going to be very tricky.
267. 14:34And I think one thing Singapore has in its favour
268. 14:36is that it tends to have quite long-distance planning,
269. 14:39and our governments, a lot of other governments
270. 14:42around the world, don't think that far into the future.
271. 14:44I'm sure you're asked this often, Stephanie,
272. 14:46but is having children bad for the planet?
273. 14:49I think one of the reasons that a lot of these environmental organisations
274. 14:54don't campaign on population reduction,
275. 14:59some do, but most don't, is because climate change is happening now,
276. 15:04and we need to address it now, and we need to address our emissions
277. 15:08right now. We're already seeing the impacts of it. Whereas
278. 15:10population change is much slower.
279. 15:12Even if you convinced a whole generation not to have children,
280. 15:16it would be another 20 years before we see the benefits of that.
281. 15:19Whereas in 20 years' time, if we don't tackle carbon emissions,
282. 15:23our planet will have changed potentially irrevocably.
283. 15:26So I think there is a disconnect there.
284. 15:29One is a slow trend and the other is very immediate.
285. 15:34And of course, Stephanie, a lot of people, when they think
286. 15:36about population decline, think about what they did in China,
287. 15:40their famous and quite radical one child policy,
288. 15:43which was designed to curb population growth.
289. 15:46But now it seems we're getting lots of examples from all over the world
290. 15:50of governments attempting to do just the opposite.
291. 15:54Yeah, and some of it is coercive and a bit troubling.
292. 15:58We've seen that there's been limits in access to contraception
293. 16:02in some countries, in Poland and Iran,
294. 16:04have made it more difficult for women to access contraception
295. 16:07because they're concerned about about fertility decline.
296. 16:09So when it gets into those coercive policies, it is a bit concerning.
297. 16:13We have seen other solutions where governments are just trying
298. 16:17to help people have the children they do want.
299. 16:20With a tax break? Yeah, or a lump sum of money.
300. 16:23But those, those kind of, um, financial incentives rarely work.
301. 16:28They've been studied around the world and they rarely seem to boost fertility.
302. 16:31What does work, what did work in the Scandinavian countries were these progressive social policies.
303. 16:35But again, they only worked for a short time period.
304. 16:38So it does seem really difficult,
305. 16:41once fertility has started to decline, to reverse it.
306. 16:44What about migration as a solution? Because we talk about it all the time.
307. 16:48A record number of people are on the move around the world.
308. 16:51Could that help? Well, it is already helping.
309. 16:53So most of... here in the UK, the US, most of Europe, they have already been,
310. 16:58we've already been addressing population decline with immigration.
311. 17:03And you know where we don't have enough doctors
312. 17:05or nurses, we just bring them in. That's good.
313. 17:07Certainly for the people who who come and are able to send money back.
314. 17:12But it also has a profound effect on the countries they come from.
315. 17:15There's this brain drain process. So it's a temporary solution
316. 17:19that benefits some people, some countries, and doesn't benefit others.
317. 17:24And we know it's famously unpopular as well.
318. 17:26We're seeing such backlash to widespread immigration. Yeah.
319. 17:29For populist governments, it's their number one,
320. 17:33uh, election kind of pledge and campaign is to bring migration down.
321. 17:36Can it ever truly plug the gap?
322. 17:39Well, I think it has been plugging the gap
323. 17:42in rich Western countries for quite a long time.
324. 17:45But then it does create problems in other parts of the world
325. 17:49and other problems that we didn't see coming.
326. 17:52Are we at a point now, then, that it feels irreversible,
327. 17:55this trend of the decline in fertility rates?
328. 17:58Well, that's what demographers predict, that,
329. 18:01um, that we will plateau,
330. 18:03the global population will plateau and then drop.
331. 18:06The only thing that would reverse that is if people decided to have
332. 18:09dramatically more children than their parents do.
333. 18:12Demographers predict that won't happen. But, you know, things change.
334. 18:16Even demographers will admit that things happen that they didn't predict.
335. 18:21So, you know, these are all predictions that we're working with
336. 18:24and no-one can read the future. Stephanie. Thank you.
337. 18:27Thank you. If you want more episodes of The Global Story,
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342. 18:44Thanks so much for watching! Goodbye.