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Hello, I'm Lucy Hockings. From the BBC World Service, this is The Global Story. The global population is growing, and it's not expected to peak until well into the second half of this century.

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Hello, I'm Lucy Hockings. From the BBC World Service, this is The Global Story. The global population is growing, and it's not expected to peak until well into the second half of this century.

But the number of children that people are having is actually decreasing around the world.

From a persistent cost of living crisis to the rapid cultural change of this hyper-digital era, the factors fuelling this trend aren't easy to define.

As more and more countries see their populations age, some fear unsustainable pressure will mount on the critical social infrastructure which holds communities together.

So is it possible to plan ahead to limit the impact of falling fertility rates, and are there ways that societies could even benefit from it long term?

With me today is the BBC's population correspondent, Stephanie Hegarty.

Hi, Stephanie. Hi. Thanks for having me.

You've been studying population trends for a long time now.

Have you ever seen a shift like this? The interesting thing about population is we focus on it when something seems dramatic.

But actually the changes are quite incremental.

We have been seeing this serious acceleration in growth, um, and in fertility rates and everything.

And now we're just that's starting to slow down.

So we are in a time of great change.

But it's interesting because we report these things and this is our business, right? In news, we report things when there is change.

But what I've always found fascinating about fertility is, and population is, it is kind of slow.

You know, it is incremental in the grand scheme of things.

But we are talking about a decline in fertility rates in this episode.

But actually the global population itself is growing and it's growing quickly. So can you put that into context?

So I was thinking about this the other day and I, I think maybe one of the easiest ways to describe it is my family, right?

My mum had four kids and each of us has had fewer than that.

My brother's had three.

I have one, my other brother has one, my sister has none.

So each of us have had fewer children than my mum.

But there's still five grandchildren in our family.

So our family is growing and the dynamics on a global level are similar.

But there's also another dynamic that's going on, which is in certain countries you have the dynamic, like my family, and then in others, fertility rates aren't declining as dramatically.

So there's a handful of countries where the population is still growing quite rapidly.

Is this Africa and Asia? Most of them are in Africa. Yeah.

And big countries like Nigeria, Ethiopia and Egypt, but then also Pakistan, the Philippines.

And they're going to contribute hugely to the growth in the global population.

But they are the minority.

So by 2050, I think three quarters of the countries in the world will have a declining population and then some will still be growing.

Nigeria is one of the fastest growing countries in the world, but its fertility rate, so the number of children each woman is having, is declining.

So it was six in the 50s, around five now.

So all over the world, this generation is having fewer children than our parents.

So can we say that by the end of the century, is this fair, that the overwhelming majority of countries actually are not going to be able to sustain their populations? Absolutely.

And the global population by the end of this century will also be declining.

Between 2060 and 2080, it's predicted that the global population will top out at about nine or ten billion and start declining then.

And then more specifically, Stephanie, what do we know about fertility rates in areas where the population is growing fastest?

So they're still declining, but just not as fast.

So in Europe, you had an average of about four children in the middle of the century.

Now it's gone down to well below two.

And this magic number is 2.1. So if each couple has 2.1 children on average, um, it's kind of hard to have point one of a child, but then the population will sustain itself.

So you need to produce that number to replace yourselves in the world and countries that are still on this trajectory of growth, they have a lot more than 2.1.

So, Stephanie, I think everyone knows that it's been a year of elections, almost around 70, we've had in 2024. And surely in most countries, one of the biggest issues has been the cost of living.

And that is surely a factor when people are making decisions around whether or not to have a child. Absolutely.

I think it's the factor when it comes to, um, especially in places where populations are, is already declining. It comes up again and again.

I've spoken to countless people in, um, Japan or South Korea, and they talk about things like housing, the cost of education. In the UK, now it costs about £200,000 ($254,000) over a child's lifetime.

That's the cost. I was horrified when I saw that!

And it's incredible that anyone can afford that.

Research came out earlier this year that, uh, it's surveys where they speak to young people, Gen Zs and millennials, about their fertility intention.

So they ask, do you intend to have children? If so, how many?

The responses were quite shocking. Almost half of the people who've never had children said they had no plans to, and that was profoundly linked to financial insecurity.

So where people felt they were financially insecure, where they felt they were less well-off than their parents or their parents' generation, they were much more likely not to want a child or to think it was unlikely for them to have a child.

And the researchers I spoke to who've been working on these surveys said it's not that surprising in this country, where you have the age where you get your first mortgage is creeping right up into the late 30s.

Childcare is famously unaffordable.

And I'm sure, um, people all around the world will understand the impact that that has on your decision whether or not to have a child.

And, um, housing, we're seeing housing crises not just here in the UK, but any country that's experiencing mass urbanisation, we have this problem with housing. And in some of the countries that are most profoundly affected by fertility decline, like East Asia, it's the cost of education that they talk about when they discuss their decision not to have children, or to have fewer children.

And what about some of the social and cultural impacts?

I mean, there are rapidly changing expectations of the genders in our society as well.

So that has had a profound impact and it's been really well studied, especially in East Asia, where you have some of the highest participation of women in the workforce and education, and at the same time, really unequal distribution of work at home.

And I've found this when I've spoken to women in South Korea or Japan about whether they want to have children or not, and they see their friends who already have children really struggling to keep up at work, struggling to keep up with the long working hours when they're expected to do everything at home.

And for a lot of the women I've spoken to, they say, I just don't want that lifestyle.

I don't want that life where, um, I've got to work to support my family.

We need two incomes, but I've also got to do everything at home.

Sounds exhausting. No thank you.

What about in countries that have quite progressive paternity leave, for instance, does that make a difference?

There was a time period where the Scandinavian countries were celebrated for, um, reducing, kind of battling fertility decline.

So the fertility levels had dropped, but then picked up again.

And this was the 90s and the early 2000s.

And that was always put down to their really, um, progressive pro-family policies.

So paternity leave being equally shared between parents, which um again affected this gender divide at home.

So men and women were doing more and more equal share of the, of the work at home. And also they had very affordable childcare.

But that progress in stopping fertility decline stalled at some point.

And those policies didn't seem to be doing the job anymore.

And that's really confused demographers and sociologists in Scandinavia.

So it seems like even when you have these really progressive policies, which I think these sociologists would agree are good for lots of reasons.

So they don't want to say don't do them, but they just they have a limited effect.

I think the profound takeaway is it's just very difficult once fertility declines to try and challenge it, and it becomes a social norm to have fewer children.

I've heard lots of discussions about why women would choose not to have children in terms of what's happening in society and culturally as well.

But how are young men particularly feeling?

There's a difference between having fewer children and not having any children at all.

There's a, I suppose, a different, um, mindset.

One of the biggest reasons why people don't have children is because they can't find a partner. That's men or women.

What we're seeing now in Europe, and, uh, it's likely that other countries are following this trend, is a situation where it's men of the lowest income who are most likely to remain childless, and that's involuntarily childless.

So it's not that they decide when they're young they don't have children, it's that they assume that they will have children.

And then as they get older, it just, it doesn't happen.

So the poorest men are the most likely to end up not having the children that they wanted.

And part of this is likely this idea called the mating gap, is a term a sociologist called called Marcia Inhorn coined.

She was doing research on egg freezing, and she found all the women that she spoke to, the reason that they were freezing their eggs is because they couldn't find a partner.

She realised that part of the reason they couldn't find a partner is that they were looking for someone of their level of education or higher, whereas we have this situation now where in 60% of countries women are achieving more in education than men.

So if you've got a situation where women are more educated but less likely to partner with someone who is less well-educated.

There's a pool of men who aren't, uh, eligible, I suppose.

And, Stephanie, there's also lots of conversations at the moment, it seems, about young men and how they feel about their place in the world, particularly in the West.

So male malaise describes the idea that young men are struggling to understand their place in the world as women are empowered.

And that's creating a kind of a gap, a gap in expectation, say, or a gap in income.

So the gap in expectation could be young men who don't expect that they should have a 50/50 partnership at home, and women who expect that.

So there is a divergence in values.

And this researcher, Vincent Straub, was saying that is really going to have a profound effect on fertility.

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But more than that, that this generation of struggling men are more likely to suffer from things like alcoholism or drug addiction.

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They're more likely to become prey to these depths of despair where, you know, depression, anxiety, addiction and all of those things affect fertility socially, but also biologically. So he was really concerned, he is really concerned that we're overlooking this crisis among young men, and that we're overlooking its impact on fertility.

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And, Stephanie, what about how society views children?

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Because it feels like that's changed as well, in my lifetime anyway.

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So that is at the core of what sociologists are now seeing in terms of the trends in Europe.

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So before, having a child and even getting married was seen as something you did on the bridge to adulthood, as you started out and in your life as an adult, you know, you would get married in your early 20s, as soon as you finished college, maybe. So it was seen as a cornerstone event, and now it's seen as a capstone event. So you get married and you have children once you've achieved all the other things that you want to achieve in life, you know, once you've arrived at a certain place in your career.

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Once you've bought a house, once you've ticked all these boxes.

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And that's a profound shift, because people are delaying having a child until they achieve those things and often aren't achieving those things, and as a result, aren't having children.

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The first thing that people might associate when they think about low fertility is an ageing population.

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Now, why is this such a problem? Well, the way that our societies or economies are usually structured is that we have a large pool of working people who pay their taxes, pay into the system, and that supports, uh, people who need to be looked after, old people and young people. Where you have an ageing population, where you have this inverted pyramid, they call it, so there's a lot of old people, not very many working people, there's just not enough money going into the system to support the people who need it.

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And that worries governments.

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And what about, um, ageing populations and what that means for just our infrastructure and institutions in society?

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In a population that's ageing rapidly, there's going to be a lot of things to pay for.

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So social care for older people and health care for older people, which is expensive.

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A lot of our economies are built on this growth model, right?

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We have to constantly have new businesses opening to stimulate this growth.

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And if there's no-one to spend money in those businesses, then they're not going to survive. Economists predict in a declining population, we will have declining growth.

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It's not inevitable. There's a lot of different ways, different policies that governments could explore, experiment with to to try and stop that from happening.

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But to a certain extent, it is.

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If we don't have enough people paying in, then we won't have this continuous growth that we've been so used to for such a long time.

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Well it can't all be bad, though, Stephanie.

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I mean, you mentioned earlier the cost of childcare? At the household level, not having a child is a sensible choice for, you know, economically.

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Like we said, it cost £200,000 ($254,000) over the course of a lifetime to have a child in this country.

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And you can save a lot more, you could save a lot more towards your retirement. You can plan for your retirement.

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So at a household level, there are lots of benefits.

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It's broadly at the economic level where when we're used to something, we've been used to something for so long, we have to adapt to change.

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And some people argue that that's inevitable and governments are just going to have to figure out a different way of doing things.

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And there are models. In Singapore, everyone saves for their own future. So you pay into a pot.

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It's much more like a private pension scheme, so they don't rely on, luckily, because they have a declining population, they don't rely on the working-age people to pay for older people.

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But it's a very different system, and transitioning from one to the other is always going to be very tricky.

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And I think one thing Singapore has in its favour is that it tends to have quite long-distance planning, and our governments, a lot of other governments around the world, don't think that far into the future.

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I'm sure you're asked this often, Stephanie, but is having children bad for the planet?

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I think one of the reasons that a lot of these environmental organisations don't campaign on population reduction, some do, but most don't, is because climate change is happening now, and we need to address it now, and we need to address our emissions right now. We're already seeing the impacts of it. Whereas population change is much slower.

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Even if you convinced a whole generation not to have children, it would be another 20 years before we see the benefits of that.

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Whereas in 20 years' time, if we don't tackle carbon emissions, our planet will have changed potentially irrevocably.

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So I think there is a disconnect there.

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One is a slow trend and the other is very immediate.

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And of course, Stephanie, a lot of people, when they think about population decline, think about what they did in China, their famous and quite radical one child policy, which was designed to curb population growth.

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But now it seems we're getting lots of examples from all over the world of governments attempting to do just the opposite.

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Yeah, and some of it is coercive and a bit troubling.

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We've seen that there's been limits in access to contraception in some countries, in Poland and Iran, have made it more difficult for women to access contraception because they're concerned about about fertility decline.

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So when it gets into those coercive policies, it is a bit concerning.

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We have seen other solutions where governments are just trying to help people have the children they do want.

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With a tax break? Yeah, or a lump sum of money.

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But those, those kind of, um, financial incentives rarely work.

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They've been studied around the world and they rarely seem to boost fertility.

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What does work, what did work in the Scandinavian countries were these progressive social policies.

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But again, they only worked for a short time period.

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So it does seem really difficult, once fertility has started to decline, to reverse it.

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What about migration as a solution? Because we talk about it all the time.

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A record number of people are on the move around the world.

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Could that help? Well, it is already helping.

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So most of... here in the UK, the US, most of Europe, they have already been, we've already been addressing population decline with immigration.

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And you know where we don't have enough doctors or nurses, we just bring them in. That's good.

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Certainly for the people who who come and are able to send money back.

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But it also has a profound effect on the countries they come from.

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There's this brain drain process. So it's a temporary solution that benefits some people, some countries, and doesn't benefit others.

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And we know it's famously unpopular as well.

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We're seeing such backlash to widespread immigration. Yeah.

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For populist governments, it's their number one, uh, election kind of pledge and campaign is to bring migration down.

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Can it ever truly plug the gap?

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Well, I think it has been plugging the gap in rich Western countries for quite a long time.

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But then it does create problems in other parts of the world and other problems that we didn't see coming.

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Are we at a point now, then, that it feels irreversible, this trend of the decline in fertility rates?

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Well, that's what demographers predict, that, um, that we will plateau, the global population will plateau and then drop.

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The only thing that would reverse that is if people decided to have dramatically more children than their parents do.

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Demographers predict that won't happen. But, you know, things change.

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Even demographers will admit that things happen that they didn't predict.

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So, you know, these are all predictions that we're working with and no-one can read the future. Stephanie. Thank you.

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Thank you. If you want more episodes of The Global Story, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts.

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We aim to dive deep into one big international story every day.

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And don't forget, you can subscribe and we'd love to hear from you too, so you can leave your comments in the section below.

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Thanks so much for watching! Goodbye.

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