Falling Fertility, Ageing and Europe’s Demographic Deficit

Abstract

By the middle of the twenty-first century, the proportion of young people globally will have fallen to less than 20 per cent. Correspondingly, the proportion aged over 60 will have increased to more than one-fifth, standing at some 2 billion older adults. This increase is through a combination of two demographic trends: falling fertility, which reduces the percentage of younger people in the population, and falling mortality, which has increased average life expectancy, and thus the number of people surviving to older and older ages. A trend which started in Europe over 200 years ago has now spread across the globe to all regions bar sub-Saharan Africa, fuelled by a fall in Total Fertility Rates (TFR), that is, the number of children per reproductive women, requiring 2.1 for replacement. In 1950, Europe’s TFR was 2.5 children per reproductive woman. This has fallen to 1.5 (2010). Future fertility is difficult to estimate: projected TFRs are between 1.34 and 2.34 children per woman by 2045 (Lutz et al. 2001). Alongside the well-recognized low fertility of Western Europe, with all countries below replacement level, and southern Mediterranean countries in particular at 1.2 and 1.3, we see a similar pattern emerging in Asia. Singapore and Korea have now fallen to below 1.2, while Hong Kong, at below 1, now has the lowest TFR in the world. Even the Islamic countries of Pakistan and Afghanistan with current TFRs of 4.0 and 6.6, respectively, are predicted to halve to just above replacement by 2050.