Should we be concerned at falling birth rates across the world? In an interview with LSE’s Anna Bevan, Emily Jackson discusses how declining fertility will shape the societies of the future and what governments can – and can’t – do about it.
Why are birth rates falling?
Over the course of the 20th century and in the first part of the 21st century, the general change we’ve seen across the world is a reduction in the number of children each woman gives birth to. However, there’s no easy answer to why birth rates are falling.
The bottom line is women are choosing to have fewer children. There are lots of reasons for that. Birth rates do change – sometimes they increase and sometimes they decrease. People are more worried about falling birth rates now, but 50 years ago they were worried about rising birth rates.
This is one of the reasons why in the 1970s there was initially quite a lot of scepticism about funding IVF (in vitro fertilisation). The thinking at the time was that the world’s problem was that there were too many babies, so we shouldn’t want to make more.
What we’ve seen is a dramatic change over the course of the last 50 years where we’ve gone from thinking the world is massively overpopulated to worrying about falling birth rates.
Why does it matter if birth rates decline?
One of the most important reasons this matters is that in future there will be fewer people of working age to support an ageing population. We rely on people of working age to pay taxes to care for people who are elderly and not working. If you have a population with many more elderly people than people of working age, that can cause problems.
Of course, the people being born today aren’t going to be of working age for another 20 years or so. Populations do just change and shift over the course of different generations. But governments are concerned about falling birth rates mainly because of those tax implications and because if there aren’t enough people to do jobs, we’ll have labour shortages.
Are there any good examples of governments creating incentives to impact fertility rates?
There are a range of things that governments try to do to increase the number of babies that women might have. Those tend to be things like tax breaks, baby bonuses or cash payments for having children, as well as better and cheaper childcare arrangements.
These are things that basically make it a bit easier for people to have children, but they have a very modest effect in general on birth rates. The reasons why people have children are not going to be hugely impacted by a modest baby bonus. They might impact the timing of having children, but they don’t have a dramatic impact.
With this said, these policies can still have positive effects. There are very good reasons for making workplaces child friendly, for making it easy for women to combine work and having children, and for giving people help with childcare. These policies are a good thing, full stop, even if the effect on the birth rate is a modest one.
The one change that did have a very dramatic impact on birth rates was China’s one child policy, where there were penalties for having more than one child. That did lead to a reduction in birth rates. This has led to a very uneven population curve where China has more elderly people than working-age people and things have now gone into reverse with the government trying to encourage people to have more children.
Some countries have considered placing restrictions on contraceptives to encourage higher birth rates. Is this common around the world?
In public health terms, preventing women from accessing contraceptives is a very dangerous thing. If you don’t give women access to contraceptives, they’re going to have more unwanted pregnancies that they might try to terminate, possibly illegally in a very unsafe way.
And any attempt to persuade women to have more children by restricting access to birth control simply won’t work. It will just lead to more unwanted pregnancies and more unsafe terminations. These are very bad outcomes from the perspective of women’s health.
Where there are restrictions on access to abortion, for example, one of the interesting and consistent things that you see is that it does not lead to fewer abortions. What it does is lead to less safe abortions and more health risks for women. If you want to increase fertility rates then reducing access to birth control and abortion is not the way to do it.
Aside from fertility policies, what can governments do to change overall attitudes about having children?
I recently heard the demographer Rebecca Sear talk very eloquently about this. She said that if you want people to have more children, you need to make society a place in which people want to bring children into the world, which makes perfect sense.
This means helping people to feel positive about the future, to have a decent place to live and to have decent access to schools. These are the kinds of things that encourage people to have children because it feels good to bring a child into a world like this. But if people are very fearful about the future and worried about just putting a roof over their head, that’s not a circumstance where people are necessarily going to want to have a child.
In a sense, the things that you should be doing anyway to make society better for people, such as decent housing, will also encourage people to have children. And beyond that, I think that governments should realise that the effect they can have on the birth rate through fertility policies is going to be modest.
We’ve spoken about policymaking, but to what extent does the downward trend in fertility reflect people’s individual choices?
It’s really important that people are able to make their own decisions about starting a family. This is why it’s important for governments to put in place healthcare systems that provide access to comprehensive sex education and accessible contraception that helps people feel in control of their fertility.
Another thing that you could do is increase public funding for fertility treatment. This would not have a massive impact on the birth rate, but it would at least mean that people who otherwise are going to struggle to have a baby can be supported if they can’t afford IVF themselves.
In the UK, there is NHS funding for fertility treatment, but it’s very restricted. Some other European countries are more generous. In the Netherlands, for example, they have relatively generous funding for fertility treatment. But there are also countries where there’s a great deal less support, either because there are very restrictive rules or because it’s even more expensive.
Could immigration be the solution to declining birth rates?
If there are job shortages that can’t be filled by people living in a country, then clearly one way to fill those gaps is immigration. We know that there are lots of sectors of employment in the UK, for instance, that rely on foreign workers.
An obvious example has been fruit picking on farms. There are lots of seasonal workers who before Brexit would come from Europe, with young people often coming for just a few months. Brexit changed access to workers from the European Union, which means that employers that need to look overseas for workers are generally having to go further afield to find people to plug the gaps.
Does the falling birth rate mean people will have to work longer before retiring?
I think certainly the idea that you stop work at 60, which some people have historically done, now seems very young to stop working. You might have another 20, 25 or 30 years left at that point, so it’s inevitable that the pension age is going to increase in the future and that people will be working for longer.
This interview features extracts from Why are we having fewer children?, an LSE iQ podcast episode.
Note: This article gives the views of the interviewee, not the position of LSE European Politics or the London School of Economics.
Image credit: oatawa provided by Shutterstock.
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