Perspectives TOT. Countries Highlighted Countries Highlight countries Find a country by name. Currently highlighted Remove all. Time yearly quarterly monthly latest data available. Definition of Fertility rates The total fertility rate in a specific year is defined as the total number of children that would be born to each woman if she were to live to the end of her child-bearing years and give birth to children in alignment with the prevailing age-specific fertility rates.
Because we can study the effect of the policy intervention in this evaluation, we can see that the relation in question is not driven by an impact of the number of children on the education of women. Luke Chicoine 12 studied the impact of another policy change, this time in Kenya, that lengthened primary school by one year from onwards and finds that the additional education of women lowered the number of children they had.
The author emphasizes that the increased early use of modern contraceptives of better educated women was instrumental to make this reduction of fertility possible. Brievora and Duflo 13 studied the link between education and the number of children women want by investigating the impact of a school construction program in Indonesia between and The authors again find that a better education of women is associated with a lower number of children.
The evidence from these micro studies is exceptionally clear and suggests that increasing education for women is indeed leading to a decrease of the fertility rate. In this visualization I show the evidence for all the countries in the world where the fertility rate is still above 5 children per woman. In these countries too it is true that more highly educated women have substantially fewer children.
Those mothers with secondary education have typically fewer than 5 and often fewer than 4 children. Those with higher tertiary education have always fewer than 4 and sometimes even fewer than 2 children. This change is so closely linked to the rising education of women discussed before that it is indeed impossible to separate from that.
The theoretical argument for why women want fewer fewer children as their chances in the labor market are increasing can be explained with reference to the same framework proposed by Gary Becker that I laid out above: As women increasingly participate in the labour market their opportunity costs for having children are rising so that they seek to have fewer children.
There is again a two-way relationship: In addition to the reasons to expect that increasing labor force participation of women leads women to have fewer children, it is also obvious to consider that the reverse is true. This two-way-relationship leads to a cycle which can enforce itself: As women decide to have fewer children and are increasingly participating in the labor market they have yet more reason to have fewer children.
Beginning with the industrialization, labor markets underwent historical changes which made the increasing labor force participation of women possible. In the poorer economies of the past the huge majority of workers were working in the agricultural sector. Work on the farms was physically extremely demanding and men had a strong comparative advantage in this labour market over women. With the shift away from agriculture towards manufacturing and services and an increasing importance of education due to technological change this comparative advantage of men was eroded and over the long-run the labour force participation of women increased.
The close link between economic growth, structural transformation, education, and population growth are the focus of the Unified Growth Theory. The link between the increasing demand for female labor, which increased the opportunity costs of fertility, and thereby lead to a falling number of children per woman are a key component of this literature.
We review the reasons for the increasing labor force participation of women in this post. Studies that explore the historical decline from high fertility rates in largely agrarian economies to low fertility rates in industrialized countries are published in the already mentioned literature on the Unified Growth Theory.
The economist Oded Galdor, one of the leading authors in this field, provides an overview in his book that bears the name of the theory as the title. There is also more recent empirical evidence from developing countries that increasing labor force participation of women contributed to the decline of the fertility rate.
Jensen 17 investigated this by conducting a study in India where the researchers provided three years of recruiting help to young women in randomly selected villages. The intervention thereby exogenously increased the labor market opportunities of these women and the author found that in response young women chose to either enter the labor market or obtained more education and both of these decisions meant that they postponed having children and they crucially also reported to want fewer children.
But if we look at the change over time of the Americas for example — a region with strong growth and increasing labor force participation of women — then we see indeed that the fertility rate declined as the participation of women in the labor market increased. Since the burden of child-birth and mostly also of the upbringing of children is borne by women, it is not surprising that fertility rates tend to be high where women have a lower social status and few opportunities outside the household.
It is only when greater importance is given to the interests of women that this changes. With more outside-options to having a large number of children women opted increasingly to take advantage of these options and consequentially the total fertility rate declined.
This can lead to virtuous cycles since lower fertility rates give women the freedom to do things other than childbearing and this in turn leads to a decline of fertility rates. The good thing about this is that these changes are desirable in their own right. Rapid population growth has been a temporary phenomenon in countries around the world.
Rapid population growth starts when the health of the population improves and the mortality rate in a population decreases while the birth rate stays as high as before. Rapid population growth then comes to an end when after some time the birth rate follows the decline of the mortality rate.
The model of the demographic transition formalizes this relationship between mortality, fertility, and population growth. Is the regularity of this co-movement of mortality and fertility rates just a coincidence? The theoretical and empirical literature suggests that these changes regularly coincide with additional changes — such as those discussed above — and that the link is therefore partly driven by changes of third factors.
But the literature additionally suggests that there is a important direct and causal effect of declining mortality — particularly of children — on the number of children parents are having. The sections below discuss first the theoretical reasoning and then the empirical evidence. If parents have a certain target for a number of surviving children then the number of children the women gives birth to will need to be higher when the level of child mortality is higher.
Of these two effects only hoarding can explain why a decline of fertility follows a decline of child mortality in the way it is described by the model of the demographic transition. As child mortality decreases, parents gradually learn that the risk of child death is decrease and see that hoarding is not needed anymore. Finally in the absence of child mortality parents can decide directly the number of children that they want. Consistent with the model of the demographic transition there might be a time lag between declining mortality and declining fertility as parents will only in retrospect learn that the environment has changed and the risk of child death is declining.
Empirical findings on the relationship between child mortality and the number of children Some empirical research studies the link in question on the aggregate level, and we will turn to this below, but there is also research that studies decisions at the household level and asks whether there is evidence for the two mechanisms laid out above. There are a number of publications that find evidence for child replacement.
A recent one is the study by Reher et al. And there is also empirical evidence for child hoarding: Raaj Say 21 and Sebnem Kalemli-Ozcan 22 both find evidence for the importance of hoarding and therefore for the reduction of child mortality rates as a driver of decreasing fertility rates.
Several macro studies look at the relationship and provide evidence: Luis Angeles 23 investigates the relationship in a large set of developed and developing countries from onwards and finds a large effect. Crucially the author finds a lag of about 10 years for the decline of child mortality to translate into declining fertility.
In this visualization, we can see correlation that we expect. Countries with high child mortality rates tend to have much higher fertility rates, while countries with low child mortality rates experience lower fertility rates. But as child health improves and fewer children die we see in country after country that the fertility rate falls and countries move into the bottom left corner of the chart.
Consistent with the explanation of hoarding we see that women do not immediately reduce the number of birth and only after a lag of some years will the fertility rate adjust to the lower mortality rate. An aspect emphasized already is that the high number of children in the past is not an accident.
Families wanted many children because they needed many children. In the agricultural, poor economies of the past children were contributing to the household productively from a young age on.
Child labour was very common as we show in our entry on child labor. This changed when the economy modernized. Technological changes were closely tied to political changes and indeed economic and technological development, with the shift from a low tech to a high tech economy, amplified the changing moral perspective on child labour and contributed to a decreasing employment and thereby to a declining demand for children.
The fact that restrictions in child labor had an effect on fertility rates is also strongly suggesting that indeed the importance of child labor before was an important incentive for the high number of children parents had before. These government policies were important for the reduction of the number of children per woman and the fast economic growth in the region. The basic argument for why the increase of education contributed to the decline of fertility rates derives again from the seminal work of Becker who argued that because of the costs of bringing up a child parents have to make a decision between the number of children they want quantity and the resources they want to spend on each child quality.
The argument in a nutshell is that educating children is very costly and since parents have limited resources the increasing costs of having children forced them to have fewer children. The model developed by Soares , 28 argues that declining child mortality changes parents incentive in the quantity-quality-tradeoff described above. In the high mortality environment of the past, investments in the education of children had low returns since there was a high risk that the child does not survive.
Parents therefore did not want to spend resources in educating children who are at a high risk of premature death and therefore might not benefit from that education. With little incentive into the uncertain future of their children, parents instead hoped to maximize the contribution from children to the household by increasing the quantity of children. Lower child mortality increases the incentives to invest more resources into each child and with limited resources parents therefore chose to have fewer children.
Falling mortality of children is of course not the only reason why children in societies with better living conditions are better educated. Technological change killed many of the low-skill, routine tasks that kept our ancestors busy and meant that workers in a modern economy need a much higher level of education. The economic change driven by technological improvements meant that the returns to education increased and these in turn increased the incentives to invest in the education rather than the number of children, as Becker, Murphy, and Tamura argue.
Conclusion on education Rich societies moved far away from their past after more than a century of this development. Today children are an economic drain rather rather than an asset. This is essentially because in the modern high-skilled economy we require a massive investment in education over many years that only pays off with a long delay.
The rising investments of parents in their children do not only have monetary costs. Additionally the rising importance of children could have increased the time and effort of parents in raising their children. And so we have to resort to qualitative assessments here. Europeans developed a more romantic view of childhood and of domestic life in general.
Educational theorists like Froebel and Pestalozzi emphasized that early childhood is a special time in which play stimulates learning. Women were expected to stay at home to create a refuge for children from the competition and conflict of the world of work. For the period since Gauthier et al 31 document that the time parents spend with children increased substantially in a sample of 16 industrialized countries for which they examined the data. In popular accounts, it is often argued that in the past and in poor economies parents aim for a large number of children as they will depend on them for support in old age.
This argument cannot have played a large role before the onset of the demographic transition as the stagnation of population growth implies that on average only two children will reach the reproductive age.
But even for the time thereafter and more generally there is surprisingly little evidence for this argument given how well it is known. In a study in Indonesia Cameron and Cobb-Clark 33 find only very limited importance of the transfers of children to their parents and emphasize that instead the elderly are mostly relying on their own labor income even at an old age.
During the period of the demographic transition when mortality was low and fertility high however there is some evidence for the importance of children for old-age support from the US where Sundstrom and David 34 documented the importance of children for the old-age support of the parents before the civil war. Also Billari and Galasso 35 examine the effect of a pension reform in the s in Italy and find evidence that pensions and children are to some extent substitutes when it comes to support in old age.
Overall however the demand for children arising out of a need for support in old age is likely to be less important than other factors examined here. The following plot shows the close relation between the income level measured by GDP per capita and the total fertility rate. Shown are not just country averages of the fertility rate and income, the visualization is also showing the within-country inequality.
Unfortunately there is no data available to do this perfectly and I had to combine income and wealth data to approximate the relationship: The fertility rate by the wealth quintile in each country is plotted against the respective income quintile in each country.
The match is imperfect because I am assuming that each household is in the same income and wealth quintile and this is only an approximation of reality. The reflex of many economists when thinking about the fertility rate is to point to income as the likely determinant. And sure enough, between countries and over time we see that higher incomes are associated with lower fertility.
But good things come together — richer countries are also healthier and better educated — and so this correlation between high incomes and low fertility alone is surely not evidence that it is increasing income that is responsible for the decrease in fertility. In fact we have already explored several third factors.
The fertility rate is the average number of children born to women of childbearing age years. Birth rate is the number of live births per 1, of the population each year. The fertility rate of a country is a figure that reflects the number of children a woman would give birth to under two conditions: the woman was to experience age-specific fertility rates and if the woman were to survive through her reproductive childbearing years.
Statistically, this means ages 15 to 44, or in some cases, ages 15 to The fertility rate isn't a measure of how many children each woman in a specific area has. Instead, it's based on the average number that a woman could potentially have.
This is also known as the "total fertility rate. According to World Bank Data from , the world's fertility rate was 2. Sub-Saharan African countries had the highest average fertility rate of 4.
Least developed countries also have relatively high rates at an average of 4. The vast majority of the countries with the highest fertility rates are in Africa , with Niger topping the list at 6. Niger also has the highest birth rate in the world of The North African country of Tunisia has the lowest fertility rate on the continent at 2. This figure puts it roughly in the middle of the two hundred countries listed.
Image source, Getty Images. What is going on? Why are fertility rates falling? Which countries will be most affected? Image source, BBC Sport.
Why is this a problem? The study projects:. The number of under-fives will fall from million in to million in The number of over year-olds will soar from million in to million in Are there any solutions? How do countries fight falling birth rates?
What about Africa? Why is 2. What do the experts say? View comments.
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